


Where Circles End

by callmecathy



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alcohol problems, Angst, Canon-levels of violence, Friendship-only, Gen, Nathan's Alive!, Set after God Mode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-08-10
Packaged: 2017-12-17 14:16:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmecathy/pseuds/callmecathy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You and Mr. Reese must have been getting along." Finch said.<br/>Nathan offered him that rumpled, full-shouldered shrug. "He didn't shoot me, and I didn't hit him over the head with a Jack Daniels. So I'd say so, yes." </p><p>After the events in God Mode, Finch and Reese are settling back into their routine of "normal". When they find out Nathan has been locked up in a government facility for the past three years, that all changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: don't own, never will.  
> Warnings: No beta, canon-levels of violence. Any mistakes are my own.  
> Even though this is theoretically possible, I suppose this is AU, since Nathan is likely dead in canon.

Light was filtering in through the windows, coy little streaks that suspended the dust in the air. A month since the virus, and the warehouse, and Root; they were in the earliest strains of summer but spring wasn't quite letting up: a light rain patterned the glass.

One of those barely-past-dawn mornings when their docket remained clear. Finch was situated at his computer, inputting lines of code and updating his various false identities; Reese was stretched out in the alcove a few feet away from him, a rag in one hand and a gun in the other. Odd tinkering sounds and smell of gun oil in the air-- Finch would never admit it, but he was beginning to find the redolence comforting. At the very least-- normal. Because it was: since they had started a new normal had developed, past the numbers; it was the pastries in the morning and the in-between hours with no company but each other's, in an abandoned Library. Although "normal" being a word he had been flinching off of, it was just the latest in a series of concessions he'd made, least of which were slipping up with the name "John", calling Reese's dog " _our_ dog", and internally considering the Library "home". With Stanton's virus done and past, the numbers coming in as frequently as before, Finch was beginning to realize just how much he'd missed "normal".

A faint beeping.

Reese looked up. "New number?"

"It is indeed." Finch swiped a few keys. "Brian Moore."

* * *

 "Looks like Moore's skipping his lunch break." Reese said.

Finch resumed typing. He'd brought up Moore's picture-- a kid, twenty four, twenty five, scruffy-haired, not a hint of facial hair-- and his information: a worker at a private tech firm, Solstice. "So do you, most days. How is this relevant?"

"Because while his colleagues are heading to _La Caridad,_ Moore is breaking onto one of their computers." A pause, several quiet steps. "Name on the desk reads Daniel Thorn."

Finch brought up the information. "Thorn deals with the hardware side of things. He's one of Solstice's leading engineers. Can you see what Moore is looking at?"

"Looks like some sort of blueprint..." Sound of voices through the line, skid of a chair. "Thorn's back. Didn't get a chance to see what it was."

"Did he get caught?"

"Not yet. He's leaving the office."

"It could be corporate espionage, Mr. Reese." Finch said. "Disturbingly common."

"I'd love to hear the statistics, Finch, but I'd rather find out whether he's planning on killing someone or someone is planning on killing him."

"Best way to find that out is to see what he was doing on Mr. Thorn's computer."

"I need to stay on Moore."

"That's why I'll be visiting Solstice's offices. If you could kindly do something to Mr. Thorn's computer that would require technical support before you leave, I'll be obliged."

A sound of assent, then a thin-pitched noise, like coffee being dispensed into a cup.

Finch's phone vibrated. He glanced at the number and cut the line between himself and Reese.

"Uncle Harold?"

"Will- how are you?"

"I'm, I'm good. Guess I'm a little homesick. I'm actually planning on flying back to New York."

"Oh?" Finch sat up. "When will you be here?"

"Flight comes in at one O'clock next Sunday."

Over a week from then. "I'll be there."

"You don't have to. They don't have many taxis where I'm at in Sudan, but I'm sure I can remember how to hail one."

"I'm sure you can. I want to be there, Will."

A smile, over the connection. "Okay. I wanted to-- well, I'll wait to tell you until I get there. It's a surprise."

Click.

Finch settled back into his chair. Past his simple affection for the young man-- he was the closest thing Finch had or would ever have to a son- Will reminded him of Nathan. It was in his looks and the mannerisms and, if he tilted his head just right, the voice; it might not be healthy, but he clung to his last connection to Nathan.

He switched back on the com.

In the background was a crackling noise like damaged electronics and exasperated muttering, a sloshing noise like liquid.

"So sorry." Finch heard Reese say. "Lost my grip. Do you want me to get tech support?"

"And a mop." A man sighed.

Finch knew the feeling; he'd experienced the horror of liquid-drenched circuitry himself one too many times- had done it, deliberately, to Nathan's computer: _what the hell?_   "Did you really have to do something quite that destructive?"

When Reese answered Finch marveled that the smirk travelled all the way through the line. "Don't forget the mop."

* * *

"I'm in." Finch said.

The office was glass, most of it: the cubicles were made up of glass panels and there were floor-to-ceiling windows; the rain gave the light an odd, wobbly look as it streamed in, glinting off in disorienting ways.

"Stay in touch." Reese said. An extraneous comment, considering Finch always did. But this being Reese-- and Reese seldom being a man of excessive words-- Finch knew that the other man was reminding him that there was a powerful government faction with the means and the motives to kill him, waiting out there. Somewhere. "As always." He replied, crossing the room.

Thorn was gathering things off his desk-- a stained mug, a photo frame-- and shaking out limp sheaths of paper.

Finch stopped short of him.

Thorn shot him an aggrieved look. "Someone spilled coffee over my desk."

"I can see that. This might take a few minutes."

Thorn wandered off. Quickly, Finch rebooted the computer. Most of the liquid had drenched the keyboard, not the circuitry. He pulled out a new one from his briefcase and  maneuvered into the recently-accessed folder. "It looks like..." He peered at it. "It looks like Moore was trying to access files on a plan developing a new processing chip. Thorn is leading the development. It's really very good."

"Processing chip..." Reese mused. "Didn't Kendall Technologies recently release one?"

"Yes, and it failed. Some sort of bug-- they had to recall it. Maybe they recruited Moore to steal the plans. And if Solstice has found out, I doubt they'll appreciate the transgression."

"Moore's heading back to the office. I'll follow him back, then check on Kendall Tech."

"Good. I'll finish up he--"

The screen went black.

Finch blinked, tapped several keys. Had Reese done more damage than he'd-- but across the slides of glass the other monitors were flicking blank. Several sharp clicks as people stabbed at their keyboards.

A whirring sound; the screens came back. A black command box was opened on them. _Root_ , he thought, alarm jolting through him, _it's Root again_.

As Finch watched, lines began appearing on every monitor.

**_It's..._ **

And then the floor dropped out from under him because this, this was not possible, he had seen them cover the body with a white sheet, stood over the grave, mourned for the man for three years and felt the tremendous rolls of guilt so deep that they scraped at the bone.

 ** _It's Nathan._** The words in the box read.

The cursor blinked as more letters rolled across the screen.

**_I'm alive._ **

**_Get out now, Harold._ **

**_They're coming for you._ **


	2. Chapter 2

"Finch. Finch, what's wrong?"

He was leaned forward so far into the monitor his nose was a half centimeter from the glass. He couldn't answer Reese, knew he should-- but all he could hear were his own shaky breaths, stunted in his chest.

Footsteps, the back of his chair being jostled. Finch jerked backwards.

"Someone said all the computers shut down. What's going on?" Thorn said.

Finch scrabbled at the keyboard. But the same signal had affected every computer on Finch's floor, likely every computer in the building; it was crude, it was clumsy, and he could trace that.

A glint in his peripheral vision. He looked down through the window. Six cars, all black, skidding up to the curb. Men slid out, dressed in creased slacks and overcoats too heavy for the weather, conspicuous bulges at their sides.

_They're coming for you._

He was on the second floor. He'd have less than two minutes.

"What are you doing?" Thorn demanded, trying to lean around him.

He opened up a command box, hit several keys. A list of IP addresses opened. Finch raked through one of the desk drawers.

One minute.

"Why are you-"

Finch withdrew a piece of paper, scribbled the address on it.

_Get out now._

The chair screeched as he stood. He limped towards one of the far doors, slipped inside as the bang of a second door came from the room behind him.

Someone stumbled into him. A cup shattered on the floor.

"I'm sorry, I didn't--"

Finch mumbled an apology and pushed around him. He was in a hallway. Workers hurried down it, carrying clipboards and coffee and files. There were doors along the wall; Finch threw open the first one he came to.

Voices, as the door snapped shut.

"Where--"

He was in a janitorial closet: grimy tangles of mops and scrub brushes, smells mixing antiseptic with chemicals and mold and grime.

"Finch." Reese's voice started registering again. " _Finch._ "

Thud of footsteps moving down the hallway.

"Mr. Reese," He said in an undertone, "you staked out the offices. Was there a stairway on the left side of the building?"

"Yes, why?"

"Because I need an escape route and I believe Control just found me."

Sharp intake of breath. "Stay where you are, Finch. I'm nearly there."

A voice, nearby. "We'll take the third floor. Have Bridgley's group check every room on this one-" Sound of crunching glass.

Finch closed his eyes. The _cup._

"Who dropped this?" The man's voice raised. "Did you see anyone come down this hall? A man, short hair, glasses, a limp. Reyes, check the doors."

It was dim and he could hear his own breathing and the only light came from the crack in the door. The mop's greasy tendrils were brushing against his neck and he struggled not to flinch. "Listen, John." He said quickly. "I want to--"

"Don't." Reese's voice came out sharp as a knife. "I'm close. I'm nearly th--"

Finch pulled out his ear piece, then his phone, and crushed both beneath his heel. They would know he had a partner; he had to make sure they had no means of contacting Reese. He recalled Reese doing the same thing not long ago in a bank , wondered if Reese had felt the same vague panic of having no one at the other end of the line, talking him through.

The doorknob twisted.

The man had rough, blunt features, the same look in his eyes that Reese had had in the early days of their partnership. Fingers wrapped around his arm and jerked him into the hallway, pulling him off balance. He caught himself against the side of the wall. A gun pressed into his side.

Six additional operatives of Control's spread out in the hall. A radio buzzed static as one of them lifted it to their mouth and said, "We've located the target." He jerked his chin at Reyes.

"Move." Reyes said. He propelled Finch down the hall, past startled-looking employees, shattered glass and pooled coffee. He wanted to call out, except it was Root's ultimatum again and he knew it without them saying it: they'd kill anyone he spoke to.

"Hauer, Jimson." the man said behind him. "Check the computers. Looks like someone sent some sort of distress signal before we got here." More static. "Yes, Ma'am. We've got him."

They went through the left stairway. The barrel of the gun jabbed into his side with every awkward step; the five men surrounded him and he wondered, with more ambiguous feelings than he might care to admit, whether their orders were kill or capture.

Finch cursed Reese for not allowing him to say goodbye.

The alleyway he emerged into was claustrophobically narrow; his feet stumbled into pot holes and puddles as he moved towards the opening.

A light splash behind him.

The shot reverberated off the dumpsters.

The gun skated off Finch's back, blood and water spattering his coat as Reyes dropped to the ground. Reese blurred in front of him. He grabbed the gun nearest Finch and twisted hard, sending the mercenary off-balanced into the others; with his other hand he grabbed Finch's arm and whirled him to the side. The fourth man recovered fast, rolling from the ground and reaching for his gun. Reese shot him, jabbed his elbow backwards and caught something that crunched. One of them grabbed Reese from behind and slammed him into the wall. He ducked a punch, drove his fist into the other man's gut and sent the gun spinning in a high arc into the brick. He shot the remaining guards in the chest.

Finch was gripping the wall where Reese had pushed him out of the way. He stared as blood pooled into the murky water. " _John._ " His voice was shaky with fear and adrenaline and relief, and even he wasn't sure whether the single syllable was meant to be an admonishment or a warning or an acknowledgement. Maybe all or maybe none.

Despite the dimness of the ally Reese's calm looked like a veneer. His fingers clenched around Finch's arm.

"Let's go."

* * *

"How did they find you?"

Finch slapped the medical kit onto the table and gestured for Reese to remove his coat.

"Finch, it's nothing." He grimaced as Finch ran a swab of disinfectant down the scrape on his arm. "I think it's more important that we get to the other question-"

"Which you have stated multiple times now, yes. I don't know. Besides, it's hardly the more pertinent one."

They'd returned to the Library; Finch's monitors were a jumble of windows. On the foremost one was the location he had tracked the IP address to.

"I've called in a private flight to Washington, D.C." Finch said as he wound gauze around Reese's arm. "It'll be ready in half an hour. The flight will only take an hour and fifteen minutes; by then it will be nighttime, and while my understanding of military tactics is limited-"

"Finch."

The words were pouring out of his mouth and he couldn't get himself to stop. "-perhaps not quite night, but with the moon's cycle as it is, it should be adequately dark-"

Reese grabbed his arm, halting the gauze.

"I don't _know_. Control couldn't have tracked my location unless-" He stopped. Unless.

Reese stared at him.

Finch shrugged. "Really not important right now, Mr. Reese. We have to concentrate on the more immediate matter."

"Fine, Finch. Then are you sure?"

"Sure about what?"

"That it was him. Nathan Ingram."

Finch couldn't keep his hands steady- he kept diving in and out with the scissors, trying to get a good lock on the bandage. Reese pulled them out of his hands and snipped the gauze off himself.

The only thing Finch was sure of was that he wasn't sure of anything.

"It was an open box." Reese continued. "Anyone could have been on the other side." He put the scissors down. "Why would he wait three years to contact you? The timing's wrong, Finch; the government found out about you a month ago. You could be walking into a trap."

"What are you suggesting, Mr. Reese? Ignore it? Pretend it never happened? Would you?" He shot off each question harder and faster.

Reese broke eye contact. "Let's say it is him. Does it occur to you that he might be working for them now?"

"You, of anyone, should understand that after the government tries to _kill you_ , you no longer want to work with them."

"I also understand what it's like to be held against your will. It changes a person." A pause. "He might not be who you remember."

Finch tried to tamp down his frustration. He was good at compartmentalizing, always had been; but his emotions were running wildfire and every time he got hold of them they twisted out of his grip. He wasn't sure if he should allow himself to hope. He wasn't sure if he should even dare to sanction the words that had been threading through his mind in a loop since he'd read them. _Nathan's alive. Nathan's alive. Nathan's_ alive.

He drew in a steadying breath. "I'm going, Mr. Reese. You can come or you can stay." He turned away and stabbed several keys on the computer.

Reese shadowed him. "You know I'm coming, Finch." He pulled out his phone and dialed.

"Tail someone, cover your ass, the usual?" Fusco said, echoing through the shared com.

"Not quite." Reese answered. "Finch and I are going to be out of town for awhile."

* * *

 "How do I get in?"

"Through the front door, I'd imagine."

Their car was idled several hundred feet from the government facility, a stark, incongruous-looking two-story. It was hunkered down at the dead end of an ally, and in the distance behind it, the Capital: lit up and white-towered, an invincible display against the fuliginous sky.

Finch was struggling not to feel bitter.

"You'll need to bypass several security codes on your way in." Finch continued. "The locks are electronic-- and luckily, _any electronic lock_ can be hacked. I got into the sitecode and--" He passed Reese a card. "--created you a master card."

The building was a front: insurance, it read at the top, but it was disguising a highly efficient group of intelligence analysts.

"Despite the time, a sizable portion of employees remain on the first floor." Finch said. "And the guards--"

"Don't think there will be that many." Reese said.

They'd broken into the security feeds an hour ago.

"It isn't a heavily guarded facility." Finch agreed. "They faked his death so no one would come looking. That said, I'm more worried that they will notify the people from the police department and Special Weapons and Tactics. Being in Washington DC, I think we can only assume response time is fairly effective-- I don't know how to fully stress this, but you _need to remain unnoticed_ for as long as possible."

Reese fingered his briefcase, the entirety of which he had stocked with lethal components for worse case scenarios. Finch fell silent.

"I want you to agree to something before I go in." Reese said. "If anything goes wrong, you get back to the plane."

Finch stared straight ahead. That building loomed in the distance and the night hung around them, silent and stifling.

"Can you do that?"

"I promised you I'd never lie to you." Out of the corner of his eye he saw Reese's jaw clench. The car door thudded as Reese got out and shut it.

* * *

Reese strode into the building. A narrow, funneled space, uniformed guards on each side and two security checks. He swiped his  
card through and flashed his ID at three of the guards. John Reeves, intelligence agent.

The space opened into a blue-lit office space: sturdy, wide cubicles, dim gray walls and everything else that went with long hours-- a paper haze and black-rimmed coffee cups. Hallways ran on either side, blocked only by archways; multiple doors spread out to unknown locations. It was a large facility, Finch had shown him the building plans.

"I'm in." Reese said. There were a few workers scattered across the office, their heads bent over their desks. He glanced around furtively, looking for the best way to locate the stairway to the second floor. On the flight in Finch had scrolled onto camera feeds of a small, apartment-sized room on the second level. Dim light and a prone figure lying in a bed. It was enough to make an educated guess. With the Agency, it would have been nowhere near enough to sanction a full-on rescue. But if Reese didn't go, Finch would-- and that made the call.

"The second floor is above your pay grade. Which means you do not want to be seen by the guards. I've fed the security cameras a loop; they won't see you, but I will."

Reese went through the hallway on the left side.

"Stairs or the elevator?" He asked.

"Whichever's faster."

He took the stairs.

Reese hit another corridor; on one side, the sculpted archways lead into an office space, and on the other, doors were spaced every several feet along the right side. He had the impression they were giving him affronted stares as he passed.

"Stop." Finch said. "There's a guard making a patrol through the room."

Reese froze and pressed his back up against one of the spaces of the wall between the archways. His hand dropped to his waist.

"He's gone."

Reese kept moving.

"Go to the right corridor. You want the sixth door down."

Reese ghosted through the open space. The light was oddly blue, making the veins in his hands stand out; the silence buzzed at his ears, insistent enough to make his back tense up. The sixth door led into another network of halls.

"Go right. Wait. Guard, coming your way."

Reese navigated the facility's halls, starting and stopping on Finch's direction. Several minutes later he reached another closed door, heard Finch's sharp intake of breath. The same breath Reese took when he knew he wasn't going to be able to duck a punch fast enough.

"It's clear, Mr. Reese." Finch said in his ear. "You can proceed."

The room was dark. The only light came from several skylights in the ceiling, casting in silver-blue from the moon. Gray shapes, mostly: a table, only one chair-- an oddly depressing statement--, several bookshelves; down a dip of two stairs was a lowered level with a sofa, an armchair. In the far corner, near one of the bookshelves, was a bed.

Reese walked towards it. The covers were pulled over an unmoving shape. He reached down.

Soft.

And even if he hadn't been an operative, years of a slightly unruly childhood sent understanding jolting through him in an instant-- a teenager's oldest trick in the book, pillows lumped beneath the covers.

"Finch," Reese hissed, "it's a decoy. We've been set-"

"Up?"

Reese whipped around.

Nathan Ingram.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Ingram was sitting in a chair a few feet to the side of the door, legs crossed, something small and flat in his hands; the moonlight cut down on him in shadowy lines and he looked like stone, some restless statue waiting out the decades. He straightened slightly when Reese's gaze landed on him. The light shifted as he did, revealing his rumpled suit, a sweep of blond-brown hair, a wide, defiant jaw line.

"John," Finch asked, his voice pitched too many octaves too high. "John, is it-"

"Yes. It's him."

"A bit past your bedtime, isn't it?" Ingram said. He lifted something in his hands, rattled it. "You'll be wanting this? I was wondering when they'd have someone come by."

Reese took a step closer.

"A circuit board." Ingram said, almost smugly. "Crude, but it did its job."

It barely resembled a circuit board: wires sticking out in odd places, cruder and thicker than the ones Finch tinkered with in the in-between hours in the Library. But that was how Ingram must have done it. Contacted them. Three years, in the night with the bare light from the sky, he'd been building himself a makeshift computer.

If Reese had the time, he would have admired that level of persistence. He realized that Ingram had had one shot at sending an SOS, and instead he'd used it to warn a friend.

"I don't work with the people who've been keeping you here." Reese said. "I'm here to help you."

Ingram stilled. "With what?" He said. Carefully, too carefully-- a man who didn't dare even hope.

"Getting you out of here." He walked over, swung open the door.

The other man had lowered the hardware and his gaze was silver-dark and intent under the odd light. Ingram stood. He had a boyish stance, halfway between a sulk and a challenge.

"Who do you work for?"

"A friend."

"Who are you?"

"A friend of a friend."

"Reese." Finch said sharply. "We made a mistake."

"What's wrong?"

"Nathan is _bugged._ They're hearing everything you say. They know you're here and they're heading towards your room."

Reese stepped towards the doorway. "We need to go, now."

His gaze flicked between Reese and the door. "About time I had a change of scenery." Ingram said, tossing the circuit board to the floor; it made a satisfied crunching noise as his heel ground into it on his way out.  

They slipped out of the room, hurried through the hallways in a nonsensical pattern of right turns and left turns that took them as far from the room as possible. Doors, all closed; smooth, unmarked walls. There was something unsettling about the uniform hallways: it was a dream labyrinth, walls too high to scale, an unending network that led to nowhere.

They rounded the corner. An elevator, at the end of the hall, light blinking on top.

"Don't worry, I'll stall it." Finch said. "Okay, go back. Don't go right-- there are guards heading that way."

Reese reversed direction. "What's happening downstairs?"

"Several of them have maintained their positions, but the majority are converging on the stairways."

"The civilians?"

"Still in the building. A firefight would be unadvisable." He paused. "I can run interference on their coms. And-- SWAT has just been notified."

"Any more good news, Finch?"

Ingram missed a step. Reese felt the other man's eyes raking the side of his head.

"Working on a plan. Stop. There are two guards coming your way from the right. Get out of the hallway."

Reese stepped past the arches; as he moved into another office space he heard Finch's sharp exclamation in his ear.

It was that alarmed noise that saved them.

Reese was already grabbing Ingram's arm and throwing them both to the ground as bullets tore through the room. Violent pings rocked the desk above them and crackling feedback came from the computers. The maelstrom eased. Soft footsteps.

Reese twisted as the guard appeared behind him. He kicked the other man's feet out behind him, saw the gun arc over the desk. The man recovered fast; he was upright in the same instant Reese reached a standing position. Reese ducked under the guard's first blow and twisted his arm behind his back, holding him fast in front of himself.

The bullets hit the man as a guard two desks away discharged their gun. Reese dropped the other man and flung himself over the desk. He slammed into the second guard.

Tangles of wires and the scratch of circuitry and the sharp end of a pen digging into his upper arm. The man began to rise. Reese grappled for his gun and shot him in the leg.

"Mr. Reese." Finch said sharply. "Are you okay?"

"Bit of a close call, Finch." He panted.

"I don't know understand what happened. The way was clear until I told you where to go. They changed direction, but they couldn't have known--" He broke off. "--Unless they knew. They must have hacked our com. They're listening to us _now._ John-- pay attention to the red lights." The connection died.

Reese pulled out his ear piece and crushed it under his heel, then his phone. _Pay attention to the red lights?_ He didn't have any idea what the hell that meant.

Reese started untangling one of his feet from the wiring.

Press of metal against his neck.

Reese went still.

"Who are you?" Ingram asked him.

"There's no time for this." Reese said.

"You called yourself a friend of a friend. A friend of your friend, or a friend of my friend?" The man had a modulated rhythm to his speech, at once warm and faintly mocking.

"That's right." Reese said. "I work with Harold."

"You don't seem like the kind of person to associate with my friend."

"You don't seem like the kind of person to associate with _my_ friend." Every second that passed, they were getting closer. Reese tried again. "I know you don't trust me, but I'm trying to help you." The barrel pressed harder against his neck. Reese had meant what he said, when he'd told Finch that captivity changed a person. If Ingram hadn't been capable of murder before, he was now. "He thinks Tolstoy and Tennessee Williams are literary geniuses but Hemmingway's 'Spartan prose doesn't stretch well over 200 pages'." Reese said. "He likes baseball and Eggs Benedict and meandering exposition." And then he shut up and hoped that the lost pieces he had collected over the months belonged to the same Harold that Nathan Ingram had known.

The pressure eased. He turned. The blue light tossed shadows at Ingram's face, giving him sharp, cutting lines.

"How?" Ingram said.

"I needed a purpose, and he needed someone who could stop bad things before they happened."

Ingram started to speak, then stopped. "Morse code." He said.

Reese turned. A security camera near the top corner of the wall blinked on and off: blinked _red._ A short blink, then a longer one, then a long, a short, long, short... dot, dash, dash, dot, dash, dot... _A_... _C_... _K_... Ack. Acknowledge.      Reese stepped into the camera's line of sight and jerked his chin down.

Dot, dash, dot, dot... _Left staircase. Distraction._

Finch. Only Finch would have figured out a way to save an op with the coms down. They reached the left staircase on Finch's directions. Footsteps clamoring inside and getting closer, a metallic pound and called commands. Reese glanced at the security camera eying them.

"Where's that distraction, Finch?"

The fire alarm tore through the building. An instant later the lights went out.

Blackness.

"And how the hell was that supposed to help?" Ingram said.

Reese turned in his direction. "Keep moving and don't talk."

In the darkness the stairway was a smothering whirlpool of swinging limbs and the hard stocks of guns; shouts echoed off the walls from every side. A rough smell of panic in the air. They plowed past the guards.

Out.

Several torch lights illuminated the first-floor office. The workers were on their feet, expressions tight with alarm; their flashlights sent scattered beams sweeping across their faces like searchlights.

A woman caught his arm. "The fire alarms-- fire?"  
Reese nodded.

"Everybody out." The woman called, gathering papers in her arms. "There's a fire upstairs."

The employees began streaming towards the door, a controlled chaos that Reese had learned to take advantage of a long time ago.

_Well played, Finch._

Flashlights coruscated the street, reflected off the dark vans of the SWAT teams. The air was nearly warm but edged with cold, like an air bubble: close to bursting.

Ingram drew in a sharp breath. "Three years," he said, and stopped.

A SWAT member was checking the employees' IDs as they emerged from the facility. Reese snapped a hand out, bringing Ingram to a stop. He debated trying to slip past. No-- the man had seen them. He considered fighting his way out-- but the rest of the team was ten feet away.  
"I told you, I'm here to meet my associates. I don't understand why I can't--"

"There's a situation inside, sir."

Sound of radio feedback and summer insects and those distinct, modulated syllables of Finch's. Reese turned.

Finch revolved at nearly the same instant and saw him. He turned from the SWAT officer. "That's them, there." Finch limped towards Reese.

"Thought I told you to stay in the car." Reese muttered.

"I thought you understood that I wouldn't." Finch replied.

"'Finch'." Ingram said. "I could have guessed."

Finch froze for the span of instant. His eyes were wide orbs behind his glasses as he turned towards Ingram, and a dozen different emotions were blazing across his face too fast for Reese to catch; it could have been love, anger, grief, joy, each one of them was too intense and too indistinct to decipher.

"I couldn't have." He said. "This. Any of this." His voice caught and he stumbled forward, reaching for the other man's arm. When his fingers met cloth Finch stared at him with the same wonder a child did after seeing something for the first time. He drew in a sharp breath. "Nathan, I'm so-- I'm so _sorr--"_

"It's good to see you again, Harold." Ingram said quietly.

The SWAT officer was moving towards them.

Finch reached into his pocket and pressed something into Ingram's hand-- an ID card.

The wind twisted around them and Finch smiled one of his rare, exquisite smiles, saying softly, "It's good to see you again, too, Nathan."


	4. Chapter 4

 Finch swung open the doors, Reese and Nathan lingering in the doorway behind him. They'd never cleaned up the floor, it was only in keeping with the illusion of an abandoned library: books were scattered across the wood and the dust, some closed, some open, flashes of prose- " _Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can_ ", " _then came another of those melancholy sighs_ "- drifting up from the pages.

"You came back." Nathan said, behind him, a note of surprise in his voice. "Why?"

"Circles begin where they end, Nathan."

He'd swept Nathan for bugs, told him he would buy him a plane ticket to anywhere, forge him the means to build a new life. _"And miss the chance to catch up with you?"_ Nathan said-- that familiar drawl and a smirk. _"I'm not going anywhere, Harold."_ Besides that the car ride and the hour-long flight and the drive back to the Library had been startlingly quiet. Nathan had had a shell-shocked look to him, and if Finch could put a face to the way he'd felt after Reese had rescued him from Root, Nathan wore it.

There was a touch-and-it-shatters quality to the silence that Finch had avoided breaching. Because every time he looked at Nathan, he saw a ghost. Since the moment he'd seen them cover up the "body" after the ferry, heard the "it's done", Nathan's death had become a fundamental law of physics. Immutable as an equation. He had the fairly bizarre impression that some law was being broken simply by Nathan being alive, walking, speaking.

They reached the second floor.

It was dawn but barely, sun slanting in in pale streaks. He undid the lock on the gate, tried to take in the place from an outside standpoint: it seemed lived-in.

Nathan paced around slowly, stopped in front of the list. "There are so many of them." He turned. "How many have you saved?"

"More than we've lost." Finch said.

That silence fell again.

In the corner of his eye he could see Reese standing stiffly in the doorway leading into their workspace.

Finch cleared his throat. "I think we can assume there will be some sort of fallout from the events of the previous night. It might be best if you stay here for a week or two, until things settle on Control's side and we can decide on living arrangements. Really it would be best for you to get out of the country, being the face of IFT..." He gestured towards another part of the Library. "We've outfitted several of the separate rooms into bedrooms. They're not very large, but-"

"I'm used to 'not very large', Harold." Nathan interrupted.

He nodded swiftly. "Yes, of course." Finch was struck with a sudden compulsive need to tidy up. He limped further into the main room and grabbed an empty pastry box, stacked their stained cups up and binned the lot. He pulled Reese's spare jacket off the window sill and hung it on the coat rack, shoved the dog bed-- Reese had dropped Bear off with Leon before they'd left-- under the table with his foot. When he turned around Nathan's bemused expression contrasted Reese's slightly incredulous one.

And that silence-- it wasn't touch-and-shatter, after all, it was more like a rubber band: elastic and tenacious, ready to snap back into place. Quiet was something Finch had always cherished, but this time it was making his back tense up-- and he realized it was because of Nathan. The man's incessant chatter had driven him mad in their dorm room at MIT; over the years, he'd come to appreciate it. As an introvert, there was an ease to leaving it to Nathan to fill up the void.

"I should check on our detective." Reese said. He came into the room, skirting to get past Nathan. Drawers clattered. Reese withdrew two ear pieces, two phones, kept one of each for himself and passed the remainder to Finch.

"How's it going, Lionel?"

Fusco's voice came through the speaker phone. "About time you call. How 'bout you pick up your phone once and a while, huh?"

"My phone got broken."

"Another one? You're lucky Glasses doesn't dock your pay."

"How do you know he doesn't?" Nathan glanced at Finch. "Is Moore safe?"

"Yeah. I nearly got shot saving him from four goons near his tech company. Stuck him in protective custody. Are you going to come pick him up, or are you still on your vacation?"

Nathan's eyebrows went up.

"We'll deal with the threat, Detective." Finch said. "Thank you very much for your help."

Reese hung up.

"You're working with the police?" Nathan said.

"One or two." Reese answered. He slipped the phone back in his pocket. "I'll go have a chat with our friends in Solstice." He hesitated. "Finch?"

A question and not. Finch blinked, then nodded automatically. The gate clanged as Reese left.

The Library settled. He turned towards Nathan and examined him for the first time since they'd extricated him from the facility. He looked-- the same; the same, except perhaps through a crooked mirror or a rippling pond. It wasn't the light coat of stubble or the disheveled hair or the shadows beneath his eyes, it was his wornness. He looked drawn. Exhausted. Jaded.

"So that's how you work?" Nathan said. "He's the muscle, and you're the brains?"

"Not on those precise divisions, but to an extent."

"Must make a better team than two software engineers would."

And that-- that was what he had been waiting for, all along. "Nathan," Finch said, his breath hitching. "After the accident--"

"Which wasn't an accident."

"The explosion, what happened-- changed everything for me. It undoes nothing, but you have to believe that I could not be more sorry."

"We both paid a price." Nathan gestured blandly at him, at his stiff posture and his leg. "The ferry?"

Not forgiveness; not a reprieve. Finch wasn't sure what he had expected... knew, certainly, that he didn't deserve either. He needed to do something with his hands. "Would you-- I have tea." Nathan shot him an aggrieved look. He sighed. "Right. I'm sure we've got whiskey around here somewhere."

"We."

Not a question, either. "I trust him." Finch said.

"I thought you didn't trust anyone." It was somewhere between a joke and a challenge. "He reminds me of the guards at that facility. Same blank stare. Still as a _cat._ "

"He is vastly different from the people who oversaw your captivity, I assure you."

"Did you vet him?"

"No, I put up a 'help wanted' sign on the front of the Library. Of course I vetted him. The Machine helped." He headed down one of the aisles.

"And how much are you paying him, Harold?" Nathan called.

Past the nonfiction section, past the literature. Finch pitched his voice higher as he moved farther away. "It's not about the money-- not for him." Finch didn't catch the less audible response that drifted through the bookshelves, but it hardly sounded satisfied.

Past the reference section. The mystery and the science fiction sections. Nestled beside the romance and dime novels was a cabinet between a cleared space on the lowest of the shelves. Finch retrieved the whiskey and headed back.

A low, moderated drone. Nathan had flicked on one of the monitors and the 24-hour news cycle played.

"If you don't mind." He said. "Been awhile since I heard what's gone on around the world. Wait-- don't tell me, we elected Dick Cheney."

Finch didn't know what to say to that level of isolation. He located two clean glasses and handed them to him.

"Been awhile since I had a drink, too."

"Then you should enjoy this one. It's--" He examined the label. "Macallan Fine Oak Whiskey. Twenty one years old."

Nathan took the bottle. "Best for the best? I hope you still drink."

He hadn't, not really. Not since winning humanitarian awards and commemorating successful business ventures; not without Nathan. Along with a disconcertingly large amount of other bottles, he'd rescued the Macallan from their IFT stock, thinking maybe one day he would have something to celebrate again-- but although he and Reese had had their good days, liquor hardly held celebratory sentiment for Reese.

Nathan started to pour, then paused. He turned the glass over in his hands. "Where's Will?"

Finch hesitated. "Sudan."

"How is he?"

"Will's fine, Nathan." Finch said quietly. "He's quit his residency to help people there-- wants to treat the underlying cause. You'd be proud of him."

He ran his finger around the top of the rim. "Would be."

"You can't see him, Nathan. No one must know you're alive."

"I know." Two harsh, bitter syllables. Nathan poured the liquor into the glasses with a smooth twist of the wrist. He glanced at Finch, hair sliding into his eyes-- and the movement was so familiar it stabbed at Finch with a sharp edge of déjà vu. "I see you've bought a few more suits." Nathan said.

"I felt it was time for a wardrobe change."

" _You've_ changed."

He nodded. "Because of you."

Nathan's gaze was tracking that full-bodied movement of the nod. Nathan tipped his glass back, liquor settling into dizzying whirlpools near the bottom. "We should talk about what happened after the ferry."

The ferry. The words Finch had heard from the government lackeys-- "it's done"-- had apparently meant sedated and made dead to the world, not dead. The next time Nathan had woken up he'd been in a government facility that could have been anywhere; Weeks and the man Finch had spoken to in the facility that had held the Machine a month ago had visited. They'd wanted Nathan to hack the Machine, burrow into the black box and rework the code so it could be used to find people, target them. He knew he wouldn't be able to break in, so he told them that it couldn't be done: _"I gave them a metaphor, they weren't engineers. Told them it was like tying shoelaces: you can tie them, can't always undo them."_ Instead they commissioned him to build a new Machine, one which they could fully utilize. And he had: _"for years, building off whatever bits of your code I could remember."_ They'd never threatened Will, not outright, but it went unspoken. Otherwise, he'd been treated well, if clinically. The computers he was using were monitored, so he began sneaking parts to build his own computer. He managed to make a bug-- dismantled one he found on himself-- which he planted on one of Control's people. The makeshift computer Nathan was building was virtually completed when he heard them find out about Finch-- heard them plan to capture him at Solstice.

"I wasn't sure my message would be there for you in time." Nathan said.

"Just." Finch replied.

And Finch told him some about the Machine, the virus, its freedom.

"So it does want us to help people," Nathan said, something like wonder or awe in his voice. _I saved five people. It wanted me to._

"You were closer to the truth than either of us realized." Finch agreed.

"Good programming." Nathan said, almost managing a grin.

Finch told him about their work, the numbers. " _A baby? You kidnapped a baby?_ " Then: " _You've been playing chess with a mob boss?_ " Later: _Ectasy? All it takes to get you high is a pretty woman? If I'd known that_   years _ago..._ "

And it hit him hard: just how much he'd _missed_ Nathan. Until he had met him, he'd spent his time socializing with circuit boards. He hadn't minded; he'd liked it. But Nathan was the first person he had felt a real connection with, the first person who, outside of a world of code and circuitry, connected him to the world.

* * *

And the numbers never stopped coming.

Their first case, a woman was plotting to kill her millionaire husband because the man had been in love and signed a prenup.

Finch was at his monitors, Nathan was pacing, Reese was navigating a highbrow party to keep an eye on the couple, and Finch had traded out their com for a speakerphone.

"How much did she say those truffles cost?" Reese asked, feigning professional interest.

"Delafee." Finch answered. "Five hundred dollars a pound."

"You sound like a connoisseur,  Harold. Come a long ways since MIT." Nathan said. "Remember when you cringed every time I spent $4 on a latte?"

Finch could _hear_ the gears turning in Reese's head.

"Yes, well, we can't all have trust funds." Finch replied.

"Sure, but w--"

Finch struggled to come up with a polite way to get Nathan to shut up.

"--when we were freshmen--"

He switched off the connection.

Nathan stopped pacing, eyed the line. "Does he know anything about you, Harold?"

"Enough."

"I guess that's a no." He resumed pacing.

Finch toggled back on the line.

"You realize going off the com is going to get one of us hurt at some point?" Reese said. There was an edge to his voice.

"I apologize, Mr. Reese, I'm here. Have you noticed anything amiss at your dinner party?"

"Yes. Mrs. Fowler just slipped something into Mr. Fowler's drink. I believe it's poison."

"I'm sure he'd know all about poison." Nathan muttered.

Finch had felt awkward having one-sided conversations in front of Nathan, hence the speaker phone; he was regretting the decision. He hit his ear piece, switching the com off the speaker.

"Did he just challenge my honor?" Reese asked.

"I'm sure he'd agree to a jousting match if you offered."

A light scuffling noise, then a splash.

"--the _waiters_ these days--" A woman said.

"I've got the glass." Reese said. "I'll get it to Carter, see if she can identify the substance. If she can pull some prints it should be good enough to put Mrs. Fowler away."

"In the meantime, please keep an eye on our couple to make sure nothing happens."

 "I'll keep you posted."  

* * *

The third case: a kid wanting to get out of a gang, except no one was allowed to get out of the gang.

Finch was bringing up police records on various members, searching for the leader. Nathan was pacing again; on every fifth step the wood creaked underfoot and every time Finch's back tensed up a notch more. Finch had seen Reese pace, with the same feral grace of a caged tiger; Nathan's pacing was like nails on chalkboard.

"Could you please consider sitting down?" Finch asked, before he could stop himself.

"I've been sitting for three years, Harold."

"I realize staying inside is difficult, but even _if_ Control wasn't looking for you, you're one of the more recognizable faces in New York. America, for that matter. You can't--"

"Thought you didn't want to play God, call all the shots." Nathan snapped. "I don't expect you to understand. You like being behind computer monitors. You _like_ to be alone."

Finch blinked. If he had changed, Nathan had, too; his temper was more hair-trigger.

"You've spent three _years_ running around the city while I--"

"It hasn't been without its hardships on our side of things." Finch said tightly, and he saw the white-out explosion and Grace, physical therapy, the back of Alicia's head missing and that void of insanity in Sam Grove's eyes.

Nathan sighed, ran his fingers through his hair. "I'm sorry. I feel like a Dickens character: wandering around dusty bookshelves in the 'decline of Western civilization.' Not that I'm not fond of Dickens," He added, trying for light. His anger had dissolved-- but that was how they did things: they fought hard, got over it fast.

Finch's phone was ringing.

"Finch, I've got Danny and I'm getting him to safety." Reese said. "But I need you to get access to their ledgers-- we need something to leverage." The connection ended.

"You sure that's a good idea?" Nathan said, pausing in his pacing for an instant. "Thought you paid him so you wouldn't have to do any..." He gestured, vaguely, towards Finch.

"Legwork? Most often, yes." He stood stiffly, reaching out to the table. His fingers whitened.

Nathan stepped towards him. "Are you--"

"I'm fine, Nathan."

"Harold..." And Nathan pinned him with a look that actually hurt; it sent rippling cracks through something that he hadn't allowed himself to indulge in, not in the hospital surrounded by white walls and scrubs, not after losing everyone. He'd never dealt well with pity. It was infinitely worse coming from someone who had known he'd enjoyed morning runs.

As lances of pain flickered through his body he wondered, wildly and altogether unproductively, who had gotten the better end of the deal after the explosion: him or Nathan. It bothered him that he couldn't answer that to himself.

* * *

By their sixth case, Nathan was helping with the numbers. Finch made sure neither Reese nor Nathan had to work directly together-- he'd learned in the field that trust needed to be implicit, which neither of the other two men harbored for each other. The additional member meant fewer close calls and less failure, and it should have meant more sleep, as well.

But at night he lay awake. His emotions felt sand-papered raw; sometimes he'd round a corner in the Library and it would take his breath away, the sheer miracle of what he was seeing. Handing Nathan a cup of coffee. Talking code. Falling into those rhythms of banter. Things he'd _known_ he'd never do again.

And the hard edges of their deteriorating friendship three years ago were still there-- the fights were just as sharp, maybe sharper, this time around.

Finch hadn't known joy and anguish were different sides to the same coin.

When things went wrong with the new number, Reese's com went down, and Finch had to duck into a warehouse in a complex of warehouses to avoid a hit man, Nathan whittled away four hours of waiting in his ears.

"...walked in and you gave me a glare worse than my father ever did..."

"You were dripping water all over my books like a wet dog." Finch interrupted. "I knew you'd only ducked into the building to get out of the storm."

"Well, I shouldn't have been afraid of a 120 pound MIT kid with glasses, but I was so damned terrified of you I knew I just had to get to know you."

And later: "...after I paid that compliment to Hemmingway I thought you were going to throw a book at my head..."

 "But then you surprised me by being an authority on Tennessee Williams and I couldn't bring myself to do it..." These were things he hadn't allowed himself to indulge in, either. Memories. When he'd first met Nathan he'd thought he was insufferable, a trust-fund kid playing scholar. But there was something endearing to that insufferability: even then, Nathan had been an unrepentant white knight.

* * *

The eighth case: evidence recently uncovered threatened to clear a jailed man framed for murder by his wife. After they stopped the wife from plotting her husband's murder to cover her tracks, they drove the man fifty miles for a reunion with the son he'd been seperated from for six years.

When they returned to the Library Nathan was sitting on the steps, an overcoat half on.

"I like people." He said. "It's just-- been a while."

The hair, damp with sweat; he was breathing a little too fast. Finch knew from experience what the aftereffects of a panic attack looked like. "Understandable." Finch said cautiously, putting a hand on the banister. "Where were you planning on going?"

There were papers lying across Nathan's knees. He ran his finger along the edge of one sheet. "Flight headed out to Sudan thirty minutes ago."

Finch despised himself for feeling grateful that post traumatic stress had prevented Nathan from leaving. "It was the number, wasn't it?" Finch said. He wanted to sit beside Nathan, but something told him not to. Nathan's quiet, his need for space, was new.

"No, Harold, it's the fact that I haven't seen my son for three years." He stood, folding the papers. "You don't need to try to understand."

"You're right. I don't have to try." In the corner of his eye, he saw Reese shifting awkwardly near the door. _You'd know that if you had anyone you cared about._ Nathan had never excelled at subtlety. "Despite what you may think, I had a fiancé before all this."

"Yes, and where is she now, Harold? You wanted to move on from the Machine and the list before, and you've clearly moved on from her. You're better at it than I am."

All of a sudden he was furious, a caliber of furious he hadn't even known he had felt. Three years ago, he was ready to marry her, to " _become himself again, no more lies_ ". Until it had been blown to bits. "I had no choice. Because you gave me none. If you hadn't contacted that journalist-- if you had listened when I'd warned you-- I would have a _life._ A _real life._ "

Anger hid by guilt. The rational part of his mind knew he was being unfair, considering the role he had played, the decisions he'd made; knew even more surely by the hurt in Nathan's expression. But what brought him up short was Reese: because Finch saw him flinch.

There was a deadweight to the silence and Finch thought, mostly wryly and somewhat self pityingly-- yet another vice he had refused to allow himself to indulge in before-- that this was where thirty years of friendship had disintegrated between him and Nathan. The decline of Western civilization, indeed.

Finch and Reese worked two more numbers over the com before Finch worked up the nerve to arrange a meeting over their next number face to face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The logic behind the argument that it's impractical for Nathan to stay in New York/U.S.: I'm going on the presumption that most people will recognize Nathan on a dime, considering Shaw recognized him after two seconds from a photo of him something like thirty years younger in God Mode.


	5. Chapter 5

Reese walked into the park, passed benches and meandering couples and lampposts; the air smelled of summer, streaks of sunlight limning the branches of the trees. He reached an open space scattered with chessboard-covered tables. The bricks clicked underfoot as he walked, matched up with the click-thud of chess pieces being shuffled about the boards.

Finch sat alone at the table farthest to the left.

Reese pulled out the chair in front of him. The side of the board with the white pieces was facing him; briefly, he wondered if Finch was deliberately making some sort of symbolic point, then dismissed the idea.

"Can't say I'll be quite up to Elias's speed." Reese said. He moved a pawn.

"Maybe, or maybe not." Finch shut a book he'd been reading and moved another pawn. "Although I've found you to be the single most unpredictable player I've ever encountered." Reese momentarily savored the compliment before Finch ruined it by continuing, "Rather like the berserkers in the Viking days."

Reese started to move another pawn, then stopped himself.

"I haven't seen you around lately." Finch said, casually.

His fingers twitched over a knight. Twelve days since they had rescued Ingram, four days since he had started operating the numbers purely over the com. Finch was looking at him expectantly. "My apartment needed sprucing-up." Reese said eventually. He moved the knight.

"I'll buy you some curtains." The pieces clinked as Finch took it with his pawn.

Reese swiped Finch's pawn with his own. When he looked up Finch was watching him carefully. "Do we have another number?"

Finch opened his mouth, closed it; the sun was glinting off his glasses, working at the shadows in his face. "We do indeed." He said after a moment. He flipped his book open-- " _Because I could not stop for death; he kindly stopped for me"_ \-- and pulled out a photo. Straight, shoulder-length brown hair, sharp features, collared shirt. "Callie Bishop. Twenty eight years old. She works as a paralegal at a firm in Upper East Side: _Garrett & Harbinson's._ Been there for... two years. The people she works with handle the defense side of things."

"And those people are lawyers. They can upset a lot of people."

"You'll need to stick close to her." Finch focused on something over Reese's shoulder. "I suggest you start now."

He turned his head.

Bishop was walking briskly through the park, briefcase in one hand, coffee in the other.

"She lives two blocks from here; she walks through this park every morning and catches a subway to the firm." He said, rising. "I have an appointment I need to keep, Mr. Reese, so I won't be in the Library. I've arranged for Nathan to assist you should you need it."

"Has Ingram ever handled an op?"

"I'm sure he'll learn quickly. Will you be alright...?"      

"I play nice, Finch; you know that."

Finch hesitated, then stood, taking Reese's bishop before he did.

"Finch."

Finch paused.

"You look concerned."

He considered, then nodded his head once. "Perhaps I should be."

Reese watched him weave around the tables, his dysfunctional gait distinguishing him far into the crowd.

* * *

Reese blue-jacked her phone and opted for a rooftop view into the second-story of the firm. Quicker than getting inside: that required an appointment.

An hour passed, two. Mostly legal jargon, mentions of a "Cummings Case"; a couple fly-by book references and the steady flow of coffee. Reese had half an ear tuned for a dry comment about faulty knowledge of literature-- _that line isn't even in the book, it's in the_ movie _\--_ or the harms of polystyrene before he remembered Finch wasn't on the other side of the connection.

A woman passed in front of the window.

"...need to get the statements from the two witnesses..." A crisp Brooklyn edge; Reese had gathered that her name was Karen Gray, a lawyer working in close conjunction with Bishop.

Reese had been delaying asking for a full brief. He was getting soft; it had been a long time since he'd had the luxury to be choosy about partners.

It wasn't that he didn't like the Ingram-- although, he didn't, not really; it was simply that the other man tried to get away with far too many snide comments. Principle demanded that Reese challenge at least half of them.

He hit his ear piece. "I need information on Karen Gray and a case involving a 'Cummings'."

Clacking of keys. Different rhythms, not the same smooth, blur-fast sounds. "Thirty six, graduated from Columbia Law..."

Reese glanced at his phone and tapped a key. At least once a week he woke Finch at his desk; it had been easy to plant another tracker on the other man's glasses. So easy, perhaps, that Reese could only conclude that Finch held no objections.

The GPS tracker pinged JFK airport.

"Harold said he had an appointment," Ingram said as the typing noises continued. "Any idea where?"

"I'm not his keeper."

"But you are tracking him."

It took him a second. When he spoke, he made sure his voice was bland. "You blue-jacked my phone."

"I thought I'd make things easier on you. Don't have to patch me into calls, I don't have to constantly ask 'what's happening'."

"If you knew where he was, why ask?"

"I wanted to hear your baseline for lying." Flick of a page turning. "That's what the FBI handbook recommends. It's fascinating reading."

"Is that where you learned how to clone a phone?"

"Hardly. Harold and I have been playing spy games for a _long_ time."

Reese wanted to ask Ingram how much he knew about Finch, whether he knew about his past and his childhood and his history; he wanted to ask about the Harold that Ingram had known, because if had had any qualms that was one: that the Finch he knew-- polite, fussy, reserved-- was an identity tailor-made for John Reese.

A mouse click. "The lawyer and Callie are working a murder case together-- defendant's name is Josh Cummings. He's on trial for murdering his wife... domestic violence." Ingram pronounced the last two words carefully, as if he found them distasteful.

Reese did, too.

Sound of a cup hitting wood. "I'm going to grab some lunch," Bishop said. "Anyone want anything?"

 Reese got moving. He trailed fifteen feet behind her as she navigated the street: it was a business area, flurry of heels and creased slacks, briefcases, coffee, folders stuffed brimful with papers. He'd been tailing her for ninety seconds before he spotted the other man following her.

Bishop cut down an alley; Reese sped up as the man turned after her.

He reached the mouth of it as the silenced barrel came up in a clean arc, aimed towards Bishop's back. Reese shot him.

The man dropped to the ground, grunting in pain. Bishop whipped around. 

Reese raised one hand, palm flat. "I'm--"

She ran out the other end of the alley.  " _Help! Someone--"_

"Reese." Ingram's voice in his ear, urgent. "Reese, what happened?"

"Thought you weren't going to ask that." He wanted to search for an ID but there wasn't time, not with Bishop going for help. "Someone just tried to take out Bishop. I took care of it."

" _Did you kill him?_ "

Reese pulled out his phone as he blended back into the crowd.

"What do you need, John?" Carter asked.

"Injured man in the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue.  Get an ID on him, if you can. Thanks." He hung up.

"Another cop." Ingram said. "Did Harold buy that one too? Commission or yearly?"

"No," Reese said. "The first one, I blackmailed. This one, she turned me in to the government."

A pause, but short enough to deserve a modicum of credit. "And you?"

Money aside, Finch had paid him. Reese still marveled that a man who supposedly struggled with human interaction had, with his arm across Finch's neck, been able to pierce through a whiskey-haze and offer him everything he needed for a way back: truth after the lies, helping people instead of breaking them. "What was yours?" Reese said, instead. Ingram did not strike him as a man who liked to be idle, who would have been content as the veneer of IFT, the go-between for the negotiations over the Machine.

Ingram understood the question; his next words were weighted with something like regret or anger, it was difficult to tell.  "He asked me to."

* * *

Finch contemplated the uselessness of being an obsessive self-castigator such as himself and Reese. It was a loop, of course: they did it because they thought they deserved it, maybe even thought they would feel better for doing it, but that repeated recalling of errors did the exact opposite.

But he should have known. They had tracked him to Solstice because of the call Will had made with him. They were monitoring Will, knew about his connection to Will, because of his connection to Nathan. All it would have taken was a little digging: they would have found a low-level "Harold" with the something-or-other surname, often in the company of the CEO of IFT; they would have found another Harold-something often in contact with Nathan Ingram's son. As soon as they'd heard the name "Harold" in that phone call they'd known. By the time the trace came in he was at Solstice.

Finch had known he should have cut all ties with Will since Nathan's death, same as with Grace. But in the months after losing everything and the months before finding Reese, he'd held onto that bit of his old life like a lifeline. And it had put his best friend's son in danger.

Finch rolled down the window and peeled several bills from his wallet. The man outside the car took them, then the cell phone that Finch handed him; he melted back into the crowd.

Finch was seated in a taxi cab in front of JFK's airport terminal, seats smelling of must and pretzels and cleaning chemicals. Several dark-suited men passed the tinted windows.

Finch waited six minutes before pulling out his phone and dialing.

"Hello?"

"Will."

"Hi, Uncle Harold. Where are you?"

"In a taxi waiting outside. Number 32." He hung up fast. The man he'd passed the money and the phone to had been paid to lift Will's phone, dispose of it, and replace it with one that hadn't been cloned.

Four minutes later Finch watched Will Ingram approach the taxi with a bag slung across his shoulder-- and Will had always reminded Finch of Nathan, but now everything about the young man seemed like a mirror reflection back. The same stance and the same swinging step-- still more like a teenager's than an adult's--, the way he tilted his head: it was disorienting as the glint off glass.

Two men drifted behind him and Finch's shoulders tensed up. _One O'clock, Sunday._ The airport, of course, would be teaming with Control's people after a line as straight as that-- Finch had practically set the trap for himself, himself.

The trunk of the taxi opened; the car rocked as Will hauled in his bag.

_Hurry up, Will._

Finch stifled the urge to duck as the men moved past the taxi, towards their cars. They couldn't see him, not in one of the few taxis that had defied New York's window-tinting ban. The trunk shut.

Will slid inside. "Hey, Un--"

"35th Avenue Northern." Finch said, quickly.

The taxi detached from the curb.

"Uncle Harold!" Will pulled him into an embrace, several days worth of stubble rough against his neck. He stared over Will's shoulder, through the rear window. Two black cars were trailing behind them.

 He pulled back. "How are you, Will?"

"Tired. Jet lag." He linked his fingers together behind his head and leaned back. "It's good to be here."

"Good to have you here." A lie. "Take a turn here, please." Finch said.

He knew a dozen ways to lose a tail, had, since college-- _always the spy games, Harold,_ Nathan had said-- and he'd only honed his skills since. Reese's relentless efforts during the earlier days of their partnership had been, perhaps, the best training he could have ever received.

"Where are we going?" Will asked. "I booked a room in Upper East Side until I decide what I want to do. Belleclaire."

"I thought we should grab a bite to eat first." Finch said.  

"Great. The airplane food was appalling."

He checked in the rearview.

"What's up?" Will asked.

"Nothing interesting."

They drove for ten minutes. Finch checked behind them again. They'd lost Control.

"Pull over here, please."

Will grabbed his bag and they stepped into the corner cafe on the street: high tables, marble counters, wrought-iron light fixtures and a disturbing amount of windows-- although there was little to be done about that now.

"How long are you staying, Will?" Finch asked.

"That's, that's the surprise. I was thinking permanently."

Finch swiveled in front of the counter. "Permanently?"

"Do you remember what I said about the underlying cause? Well I got this offer to finish up my residency at a diagnostics clinic. We'd be looking for the cause, not the symptoms. It sounds like a great opportunity."

"What can I get for you?"

Finch turned back, ordered tea, because Reese said he never ate in the field and he knew right now he was in the field. Control was, not far away and getting closer, tightening in like a noose.

They took their seats.

"What about your work in Sudan? I thought you were done with all of--" He gestured, widely. "--this."

He blinked. "I thought you'd be happy."

"I am, Will. I--" He thought of Control's operatives in the airport, their surveillance on the young man. He thought of what they had done and what they would do, if they ever thought that Will had an inkling of the Machine. "I'm very happy for you. Really."

He leaned forward. "Good. What I was doing... the work, the people... was amazing. But I miss being here. Miss being around you, and Mom, and--" He brushed the hair out of his face. "--and I guess it feels more like Dad here, too."

Finch flinched.

"Sorry." He hesitated. "You ever think we should talk about him more?"

Finch fiddled with his tea. And yes-- if it had been just a little more than a week before, the answer would be yes. He would have craved the opportunity to remember with someone. And to mourn with someone. Will was waiting for an answer. "What... would you want to talk about?"

  "I don't know. My mom, she doesn't say much about him-- never did after the divorce. I just wish I'd known him better. We never talked much either; he was always off at conferences, or somewhere." He hesitated again. "Wish I'd... there were things I should have asked him. Said. I always figured I could do that some other time."

"You must miss him terribly." Finch said, and he felt the grief welling up again, familiar as an old ache-- because in a way, Nathan would always be dead to him. That day on the ferry, that loss, had chipped away a piece of Finch that couldn't be reattatched. "Why don't we talk about you, Will?" He said, as gently as he could with a vice tightening around his vital organs. "Are you going to move into the Loft?"

"Thinking about it. Right now I want to be in this part of the city." His mouth curved up. "Karen called."

Karen: Will's old girlfriend. She had an apartment in the Upper East Side, a few blocks, if Finch knew his geography correctly, from Belleclaire. One call. That was all it had taken, in part, to make a man fly halfway around the world. " _Ah._ " He said.

Will ducked his head, grinning.

Will was smiling across the table and it struck Finch in one hard jolt: the wrongness of it. He'd been playing father to Will for three years; now he was teasing him about girls and discussing his career. The words were rolled on his tongue in one careless burst: your father, he's alive.

A dark suit, catching in the corner of his eye.

Finch turned towards the window.

The figures of two men, the view of them slivered and sharded by the ongoing traffic, stood on the other side of the street.

The chair snapped back as he stood. "I'm so sorry, Will, I-- I forgot that I had an appointment. Work related."

The crosswalk flicked on; the men were moving towards the number 32 taxi.

"You work too much, Harold, same as my dad."

"No rest for the weary." It wasn't just Will, it was everything. Sooner than later, he was going to have to stop stalking-- and that was what it was, if he were honest with himself-- Grace. His indulgences had put both her and Will at risk. If he wanted to keep the people he cared about alive, he was going to have to abandon every semblance of the wreckage of his former life. "Will, I--" Finch's voice caught. Tomorrow he would file the death certificate of "Harold Wren", arrange a closed-casket funeral. Tomorrow, he'd build himself an app that alerted him whenever he was within 100 meters of Will. "You know I love you, don't you?"

Will cocked his head, then smiled crookedly. "Sure I do, Uncle Harold." He hugged Finch. "Love you, too."

* * *

"--need to look into the threats, see who wants to harm her--" Reese.

Finch reached the top stair. It was evening; he'd spent the past several hours obsessively winding through the city, trying to lose a tail that probably didn't exist.

"--all that matters is that we know someone _is_ going to. You need to go out there and follow her until something happens--" Nathan.

Their voices had the same battle-weary rhythms of a fight that had been practiced over and over-- and few had the argumentative stamina of Nathan, possessed the stubborness of Reese.

Bear scrambled up to him, pressing his muzzle against Finch's hand. Whined anxiously.

He followed as Finch limped into the main room, stopped: because it still brought Finch short, every time. Reese was lounging against one of the cabinets in the back corner in his predator's stance, Nathan was draped over the swivel-chair in front of the monitors in one his carefully careless positions, and it was Finch's past and his present, blurred into one. And memories faded: memories were like the taste of liquor without the burn through the throat. All the things he'd thought he remembered about Nathan were so close and too-fine-to-cut.

The chair screeched as Nathan swiveled towards him. "The prodigal son returns. I was beginning to think you'd actually taken a vacation. Or are you still working at IFT?"

And the gears kept turning.  _Now Reese knows I have brothers..._ Finch had contingencies upon contingencies to protect his true identity. He meticulously deleted himself from security footage and photographs, eliminated his digital trail. But the one thing he had never, ever thought might be the weak link, was the man with the key to his locked past: Nathan.

"My cover was blown." Finch said.

Reese smirked.

Nathan shot him a sidelong glance before turning back. "You're not the only one who's using a cover. 'John Reese' doesn't appear on any database. Your work, I assume?"

"Is digging into my associate's history really the best use of your time?" Finch asked mildly.

"Never can be too safe-- isn't that what you used to say? And you said you vetted him, but two eyes are better than one."

"I have two eyes, Nathan."

Reese straightened and moved closer to the table. "He put them to good use. Finch knows exactly everything about me."

Finch took a step closer to them.

"Which is what?" Nathan said, quietly.

"Everything I've ever done." One of his hands dropped to the back of Nathan's chair. "Espionage... blackmail... murder..."

The tense shoulders, one hand tightening into a fist; Finch had seen him with the gun on Reese in the facility, watched the unwavering barrel. He'd never asked Nathan how he managed to save those five people off the irrelevant list.

"Mr. _Reese."_ Finch warned.

He turned his head. "Like you said to Carter, Finch: if we're going to work together, a little bit of trust is in order." He pulled his phone from his pocket, tossed it in a drawer, and withdrew a new one.  "Full disclosure is a fair measure of trust."

Finch had a feeling Reese's words weren't meant solely for Nathan anymore.

"Speaking of trust." Nathan revolved in one dramatic chair-roll. "JFK airport."

Finch froze. _He knew._

Nathan was watching him carefully. "So it is a secret. Thinking of flying somewhere? Picking someone up? Planning on investing in aviation?"

Finch's thought of _how many pairs of my glasses has Reese planted a tracker on?_ juxtaposed with _is Nathan spying on Reese or did Reese tell him?_ to culminate into a paranoid, claustrophobic panic. All of a sudden the Library felt overcrowded. The room seemed closed-in, huddled in on itself; it no longer felt like solace and sanctuary and home.

He limped forward and awkwardly stretched around Nathan, tapped several keys. "So what did you find out?"

Nathan stood, maneuvering past him and Reese.

Reese gave Finch the brief. After the attack he had searched Bishop's office, finding information on her computer; Nathan had delved into the details of the case. It was a fairly high-profile one: Josh Cummings was a wealthy shareholder, his wife, Julie Pierce, a local reporter. She'd been shot; friends and family of Miss Pierce had said she was afraid of her husband. It hinged on the window of time in which two witnesses, one, a cashier in a corner deli, the other, a worker at a gas station, said they had seen Cummings. If the defense could prove that the witnesses' testimony was valid, Cummings was nowhere near his wife at the time the gunshots were heard.

"And Miss Bishop and Miss Gray have received death threats?" Finch said.

"Gray's received threats from the public, mostly, but Bishop's are from the brother of the wife. Brian Pierce." Nathan said, rummaging in the cabinet. "I have to say I sympathize with him-- to an extent. Cummings legal team is going to be the reason he gets off."

"Are you saying we shouldn't try to save Bishop?" Reese raised his eyebrows in a flick that was less of a question and mostly a challenge.

"Right, Reese, it's just a job to you. Doesn't matter what happened to Julie Pierce."

Reese's body went rigid-- _still as a cat,_ Nathan had said, but infinitely more lethal.  

"Why send death threats to a paralegal?" Finch interjected. "They work behind the scenes, out of the public eye. If there are threats, most often it's the lawyer to receive them."

"Maybe she's the brains behind their operation and someone found out." Nathan said, blandly. "Sound familiar?"

"Either way," Reese said, "Bishop has received death threats. She's spooked, Finch. Has a .45 in her office."

"The man who made an attempt on Miss Bishop's life." Finch said. "Has Carter gotten back to you with an ID?"

Reese tapped a key on the monitors and a mug shot came up. "Alex Campbell. If he's a killer-for-hire, someone will have had to pay him. They might have wired in the money."

"I'll hack his accounts, see if there were any recent transfers and try to trace them if there are."

"Except we don't know he's a-- 'killer-for-hire'." Nathan said, withdrawing a bottle and a glass from the cabinet. "Campbell has previous charges for assault and robbery. Could just be a common mugger."

"That's quite a coincidence." Finch said. "A mugger that happened to nearly kill a woman whose number came up?"

"'No one can confidently say that he will be living tomorrow'."

"Euripides." Reese said, easily.

Nathan tilted his head in something close to approval.

 It was an attractive parallel, the Greek tragedian and Nathan: both unconventionally compassionate towards society; Euripides had died from old age in voluntary exile. "Old age", of course, being the operative words. He hid an internal wince. Finch wondered how long Nathan had expected the government to allow him to live; he wondered, with a mixture of apprehension and hope,  whether Nathan was contemplating the prospect of longevity again.

 _Heart attack,_ Finch decided abruptly. He would kill Harold Wren with a heart attack, have him "cremated".

Finch watched Reese watch Nathan slant the glass back. He knew it bothered Reese; he'd mentioned the drinking to Nathan, received, " _...not like I have a lot else to do..._ " And it was the same as before: the further Finch had buried himself in the making of the Machine, the farther he had shut Nathan out, the more the other man had drank.

Reese turned towards Finch. "Muggers don't wander around with silencers."

"I get the feeling you're speaking from experience." Nathan said.

A high-frequency tension thrumming in the air, almost too high to register. It was dark outside and the streetlights below tossed in odd glints of light that spilled shadows across the walls.

Nathan set down the glass with a resounding thud. "So where do we go from here?"

They attacked the same way wolves did, worrying at the kill with sharp nips and quick darts, skirting out of the way before the prey could land a hard blow. Finch realized, somewhat dully at this point, his miscalculation. The two men were as remarkably different as they were remarkably alike. Both charmers, both smooth and self-assured, men who liked to instigate action, not react to it. Finch had fit so well with each of them, respectively, because he was and could be everything they weren't. An excellent team: each filling in the other's disadvantages till the output produced was a sound whole. It was only logical that Reese and Nathan would be incompatible.

"We watch. We wait." Finch said.

More silence, stiff backs and the smell of whiskey. It occurred to Finch that a heart attack might not work; Will was a doctor, and Finch was, relatively speaking, healthy. On one of the earlier days after Will had "lost" his father, he'd dragged Finch in a near-panic to the clinic to have his health checked. Will knew his cholesterol and blood pressure were sound; Finch had further reassured him by telling him his family had no underlying risks of disease.

 _Brain aneurysm instead, maybe... stroke?_ Oh, God, what if Will wanted an autopsy? Suicide would be easy, but he couldn't-- wouldn't-- do that to Will.

Cutting contact with the young man felt like defusing an explosive. Which still at the least left one: Nathan. Because with each of those questions-- _investing in aviation? picking someone up?--_ Nathan had eyed him sharply, gauging his reactions. He was an unfailingly smart man. It wouldn't take much for him to realize just how close his son was-- and it wouldn't take much to reduce all their lives to fragments.

It was ironic, Finch realized with bitter amusement, thinking of explosives in metaphorical terms-- when it was the literal ones that had already destroyed his former life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About the "prodigal son" bit-- for the purpose of this fic, I'm assuming Finch wasn't bullshitting Carter about having brothers.
> 
> And a note on the excerpt from Finch's book that Reese sees:  
> "Because I could not stop for death; he kindly stopped for me" is part of a poem by Emily Dickinson. She was intensely private, reclusive, and quirky, and in my head canon Finch is very fond of her.


	6. Chapter 6

Footsteps, not Reese's panther glide, then a hand on his shoulder, not the familiar wood-thud of a cup on the table. Finch blinked awake. A patchy sense of deja vu zipped through him: hundreds of times during college and in their "Orwellian nightmare" of an office Nathan had woken him from an awkward sleep in front of the computer monitors. Stiffly, he drug himself into a sitting position.

"You really shouldn't keep doing that." Nathan said, handing him a cup of tea. _"Take a break, Harold"--_ Nathan's words, echoing faintly up from thirty years, back in a dark dorm room with only a melatonin-producing screen illuminating his surroundings. "Can I get you anything? Pills? A-- an ice pack? Bring the sofa up from the first floor?"

He wasn't joking. On the few occasions Finch had taken ill, Nathan had been an earnest but baffling caretaker: burning the eggs while fetching the tea, offering a dozen things at once, many of them improbable-- ice cream or ice chips when it was ninety degrees out and would never survive the drive back, more comfortable mattresses or chairs when it was three flights up to their dorm room.

Finch didn't favor the implication that he was in need of a nursemaid. "I'm fine." He said, a hint too coldly.

Nathan lifted his hands, palms flat. The table creaked as he leaned against it, slanting the cup back in a lazy tilt. "So did you find anything?"

"I did." Finch reached for his phone.

"Bit early to be contacting your employee, isn't it?"

Employee, again. Finch wanted to tell Nathan about the John Reese he knew, the one that had sat across the table convincing a good doctor not to kill a rapist, the one that had told him in a parking garage to stay away even though it would mean his death, the one that had raced across a train station and offered a hand that felt like an anchor after two terrible days.

But words and explanations had rarely changed Nathan's mind before, and Finch wasn't altogether sure there was an adequate way to explain the exact boundaries of his partnership with Reese. Not when such things as breakfast preferences and favorite colors were guarded fiercely but kidnapping and bomb vest rescues were given without hesitation.  Finch put the phone on speakerphone and spoke to them both. "Good morning, Mr. Reese. Our hit man did indeed receive payment-- or half of it, I should think. I traced it back to the accounts of the defendant's wife's brother, Brian Pierce. He has a record: once for possession, once for assault."

"Fits the bill. I tailed Bishop to work; I'll go talk to him."

"Good. I'll--"

Nathan leaned around Finch, tapping a key.

The screens were whirring to life before Finch had registered what Nathan had done. Finch grabbed the mouse and scrabbled at the keyboard as the black faded off the monitors, had the windows closing out but already: Nathan had seen it.

Nathan eased his weight off the table. "That was your Wren identity. One of your oldest. The one you used with my family." He stared at Finch. "But you weren't updating a false identity and you weren't erasing a digital trail" He reached for the mouse, brought up the Obits again. "You were killing it."

Maybe if Finch had answered more quickly. Maybe if his split-second instance of silence hadn't indicated the deception. But he'd made his deal with Reese and it had been a very long time since he'd upfront straight-out lied. "Considering Control's attempts to locate us, I figured--"

"Some things never change, do they?" Nathan asked, a hard, bitter edge to his voice. "I see you're back to your secrets again." His cup hit the wood. "You were arranging a funeral because someone was going to miss you. And the only person who knows about Wren and would do that is my son."

"Nathan."

"You were at the airport yesterday... why?"

Finch didn't answer.

"You told me he was in Sudan."

"He was."

"'Was' being the operative word?"

The chair rattled as Finch stood. He stepped around the table, gathering papers as he went.

"Where is he?"

"Nathan. I _need you to trust me."_

"Trust you, Harold? We have never trusted each other. Not really."

It brought Finch short: because it was true. He'd spent most of his life thinking trust was akin to the feared "backdoor", a vulnerability, weakness.

"Alright, Harold." Nathan yanked a scrap of paper from his pocket: six digits, a rough scrawl. "Good thing I have one of your detective's numbers... right here."

"Where did you--"

He started dialing. "It was on your employee's contact list."

"Did you-- did you hack his phone?"

It rang. The connection opened on the other side.

"Detective Carter."

Finch lunged forwards. "Belleclaire, Upper East Side."

"Alright..." Carter said. "Is John in trouble, or did he drop another body?"

Finch snatched the phone away from Nathan. "My apologies, Detective, misdialed." He hung up and turned on Nathan. "What are you _doing?_ "

"Belleclaire?" Nathan jerked open one of the drawers, dropped something black into his pocket-- a phone?-- and swung his coat off the rack.

"I picked him up from the airport yesterday. But Control's people-- the same people who held you for three years-- there were a dozen of them there." _Nathan, please. Tell me what I can do to stop you._ "You have to understand just how precarious our situations are."

"I have missed _three years_ of my son's _life._ " Nathan hissed. He was leaning across the table with his palms slammed flat against the wood and Finch felt himself nearly reciprocating the movement, and it was before, just like before-- except three years later he couldn't because there were metal rods shoved through his body. "Will is out there, right now, a--" Nathan swung his arm in a sharp, frustrated gesture. "-- a subway ride away. And you just expect me to walk away."

"I expect you to move _on."_

"You have had three _years_ to build a new lifefor yourself."

Finch gritted his teeth and hung onto the edge of the table, tried to anchor the anger. "Yes, and if you go, you endanger yourself, your son, me, and probably Reese and everything else we have done all that time."

Nathan started walking out of the main room.

"Nathan!"

He whirled. "You can lie to me about anything. Everything. But _never_ lie to me about my son."

He walked out.

* * *

The light was slanting in through the windows and it was grayer and bluer than it had been in a long time. The cobwebs outside shimmered, thin and tricky.

Quiet footsteps.

Finch lifted his head. "Nathan?"

"No," came Reese's low reply, and Finch met his gaze fast enough to see that blink of hurt in the other man's eyes before it vanished.

"He's gone," Finch said softly, "Nathan. He went to see Will." Although he knew Reese knew; Finch had realized, the moment he'd seen Reese, that he had forgotten to turn off his com.

A chair rolling across the floor. When Finch looked up again, Reese was sitting in front of him.

"What can I do, Finch?"

Simple words, an even simpler meaning. Finch had felt it before, during their trip to get beer-- " _it's time we went for that beer",_ their walk in Bryant Park-- " _you lost a friend; you did what you had to do":_ an inexpressible gratitude towards Reese for being John Reese. Finch wanted to say that but he didn't know how. "What we always have." Finch answered, instead. "Keep helping people, for as long as we can."

Reese's eyes drifted towards the table. Finch was smoothing out the bubbles on the lamination of two ID cards, checking that every edge was flawless.

The printers chugged out several sheets of paper. He stood, sidestepped the table and pressed them into a folder. Birth certificates, passports and papers, two false identities for Nathan and Will. It was everything they needed to start fresh; Finch felt the burn of the paper beneath his hands, that same vicarious thrill of anticipation and dread that he got every time he held the promise of a new life.

* * *

Pierce was out, so I went in." Reese said.

Finch parked. Belleclaire rose across the street in front of him, aged brick and windows and black-trimmed framework. It was a sullen morning: only a few fitful drafts stirred the gray air.

"And have you found anything?"

"I think we might be wrong about him. Unless he's really good at hiding his computer history, the death threats didn't come from here."

"I wouldn't send death threats from my house, either." He crossed the street. Midmorning bustle: the crowd was a blur of moving figures, suits and brisk paces; Finch kept flinching, thinking a shadow was one of Control's operatives, only to have them pass by without a glance. Every glint off glass was the possible reflection of a sniper's scope.

"Yeah, but there's a manila folder in his desk and I'm pretty sure Callie Bishop sent it to him."

"Why?"

"Note on top..." Reese's voice dropped into the rhythms he took on when he was reading. "'I looked into it, and you were right.'" Creak of wood, sound of a page turning. "The papers inside are bank statements, Finch. Money transactions into the accounts of the two witnesses the defense wants to use to get Cummings acquitted."

"You think someone has been... paying them off to change their testimony?"

"I don't mean to disillusion you, but it wouldn't be the first time due process has been corrupted. My bets are on Cummings. He has the money."

"And Mr. Pierce suspected what Mr. Cummings was doing and asked the paralegal on the defense team to look into it." Finch scanned the sidewalk. "Mr. Cummings would have to have someone on the inside, someone with the means and the connections. Someone who knew about the witnesses and had enough access to them to convince them to alter their testimony."

A mouse click. "Just found a shipping notice for 20lbs of Semtex. The electronic signature is close to Pierce's but... not quite."

Five well-dressed men drifted towards him and Finch stiffened; they passed.

"I think whoever's behind this is setting Pierce up." Reese said. "They found out that Bishop is looking into the payoffs and they're planning on letting him take the fall for her murder. He's a good candidate."

"You told me that the patsy isn't meant to make it out alive."

"Explosives will do that."

"Yes." Finch said, mouth tightening. "They will."

A young, blond-haired man stepped out of the doors of the hotel. Finch ducked to the side, against Belleclaire's wall. "I'll get back to you." He tapped his ear piece without taking his eyes off Will.

A man stepped into the street. Even past the sunglasses, the hat, Finch knew it was Nathan. He pressed forward as Will headed down the end of the street; the hotel doors flashed open and four men trailed out. Nathan froze.

Finch realized in a sharp recollection what the black object that Nathan had slipped into his pocket had been. A gun.

Nathan knew how to use one, and he had none such reservations as Finch did.  Finch opened his mouth to call out; but Control's men were edged up on Will like a shadow, hands drifting near their waists.

Will was moving in Nathan's direction, towards the crosswalk. Twenty, thirty feet away. Finch stumbled forwards.

Twenty five.

There was a dark-haired woman standing beside the lamppost near the crossing. She lifted her hand in a wave and Will sped up.

Fifteen.

Finch thought of Grace, thought of the first time his app had alerted him to her proximity. He'd stood frozen in the middle of the street as his phone beeped madly; she got closer, forty, thirty, twenty feet away, something sure as instinct urging him to go to her, pushing him home.

Ten.

But she hadn't seen him. The blur of the crowd had saved him, obscured him as she went by. Close enough to touch.

Nathan stepped forward.

Will reached Karen. They embraced, leaning forward on their toes, Will's mouth curving into that infectious smile of his, the wind carrying Karen's voice over the air: _I'm so glad to see you, Will, I've missed you; you're home._

Nathan stopped. If Finch could hear them, Nathan could, too: all the words Nathan and Will should have exchanged. Nathan's expression was a raw riptide of love and longing and grief-- and Finch wondered if that was the same look he held every time he hid behind park benches and payphones.

Finch stepped beside Nathan.

He kept his eyes fixed on his son when he spoke. "Will needs a father, Harold."

"I know."

"If I could just--"

"I know."

And the crowd spun around them, a hundred people with a hundred different lives, many of them normal, all of which he and Nathan could never have.

Finch felt Nathan turn towards him. "Do you know who she is?"

"Karen? She's an old girlfriend. You'd-- you'd like her."

"You know more about his life than I do." Bitterness skirted the margins. "Hell. Maybe you always have. I was never as much of a father as I should have been." He was balanced on the ends of his feet, as if they wanted to press him forward of their own accord. "You believe in second chances?"

Finch turned the folder over in his hands. After a moment he passed it to the other man.

Nathan flipped it open. His breath let out as he ran his fingers along the new IDs, new names, birth certificates and passports. They watched as Will leaned over and linked hands with Karen.

"You think that would be fair to Will?" Nathan said.

"I think it's better than both you and him dead."

"He deserves a normal life." He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth for a second, then rocked back on his heels. "And so do you. All this time, I thought-- if you'd survived the explosion-- that you'd be with her, Grace. Can't say I wasn't bitter." He looked away. "You said you started helping people on the irrelevant list because of what happened. But it never did. Why don't you go back? They don't know about her; it's not too late for you."

The ground beneath him was tricky and full of holes, because everything he had done in the past several years had been built upon one moment, one catalyst-- something that had never really happened.

Finch realized, on one deep breath, that he was the one who had gotten the better end of the deal. Despite the limp and the pain. Despite everything that had come after they started their work with the numbers, he'd take that over a stagnant three years. He had moved forward; he had gotten second chances. Because even though he'd known that the one thing Reese needed to hear in the beginning was that he wouldn't be told a lie, the one thing Finch had known, without a doubt, that he needed to do after spending his life lying to those he cared about, was not tell a lie.

"We should go." He said quietly, nodding towards his car. "Y--" His pulse clattered under his skin because Will and Karen had started back in their direction and Control's operatives had turned in one smooth unit, towards Finch and Nathan. They hadn't seen Nathan before; they were staring at him now.

Nathan grabbed Finch's arm, fingers digging in. "Where's your car?"

Across the street. They'd never get there, not with his limp. Finch fumbled in his pockets-- phone, scrap of paper, a receipt, pencil, _damnit_ -

Control's men cut through the crowd, hands flashing as they tapped their ear pieces.

Finch shoved his keys into Nathan's hands. "Go."

"For Christ's sakes, Harold." Nathan stepped into the street and raised his arm. A taxi jerked to a stop.

Finch slid in and snapped out the first street name that came to mind.

"We need to get you out of New York as soon as possible." Finch said. "They suspected you were here but now that they know they're not gonna stop looking."

"What about you?"

"There's a distinction between our situations. I was not the head of IFT."

There was a startling trace of flint in Nathan's eyes. "No. You're weren't."

His phone was ringing. He hit the speakerphone.

"We've got a problem." Reese said.

Finch checked in the rear window: they hadn't reached their cars yet. "What happened?"

"I found an email on Pierce's computer. He set up a meet with Bishop in Carl Shurz Park in front of the East River. Fifteen minutes ago."

Finch understood. "Turn here, please." To Reese, he said, "Whoever hacked Mr. Pierce's computer to make the death threats and Semtex transactions look as though they came from it were likely monitoring his email as well."

"It's the perfect opportunity. It'll look like Pierce killed both himself and Bishop."

"Or that he made a mistake and was killed in the blast."

Sound of footsteps, fast breathing. "I'm ten minutes away."

 An intersection came up.

"Take a left." Nathan called. That way led to Carl Shurz Park.

"No," Finch said, "Go straight."

"We're closer than Reese is and someone has to get to Bishop."

"I've got a safe house fourteen blocks away. I'll drop you off there and go back--"

"Safe house." Reese said. "Finch?"

"Control is currently in pursuit of us."

"Take a left." Nathan told the driver.

The cab driver was staring at them in the rearview mirror as the car sped towards the intersection and Finch thought of those ringing payphones he'd tried to ignore on his way to get Reese from Donnelly. Right or wrong, Reese and Nathan came before the numbers: always. "Go straight. Please."

"We need to get to the park. Neither you or Reese would get there in time--"

"He's almost--"

"Almost is never good enough."

Said like a man who knew. _I saved five people. I lost seven._

Nathan's voice lowered. "I expect you know by now that I have a gun."

Finch threw a disbelieving look at him.

"No, and I wouldn't. But the cabbie doesn't know that.

It was the same ultimatum-decision-making process that had always governed their friendship: they didn't compromise, they sought leverage against the other and used it.

Finch told the driver to turn left.

*

They pulled over near the far end of the park. Finch opened the door. There were hardly any people out: a few stragglers, a couple strolling along the waterfront, a man leaning against the buildings bordering the park with his thumbs glued to his phone.

"I see him." Nathan said.

Pierce was leaning against the metal railings looking over the river, the lump of a backpack set on the row of benches behind him. They were backed by the city behind and the city in front, a bridge crossing in between; it was still barely-morning and the water looked weary.

"Miss Bishop must be late--"

A woman hurried passed them, her heels staccato on the brick: Bishop.

"Mr. Reese," Finch said quickly, "We have eyes on both of them. If there's any trouble, I don't see it."

"I'm a couple of minutes away."

A vague memory...

Finch slid out of the seat, panicked. A door snapped opened behind him.

"What's wrong?"

"Nathan, get back in the car!"

"What is it?"

...Matt Duggan and a stroller left unattended...

The backpack.

...a woman with a scarf and sunglasses hiding her face...

"Finch." Reese said, in his ear.

And that man, leaning against the wall with his phone--

" _It's_ _a bomb!_ "

"Finch stay in the car." Reese said sharply.

"I can get to her." Nathan pushed past Finch.

"Na--"

He pounded down the boardwalk at a dead run, towards the woman.

"Nathan!" He limped forward.

"Finch, you and Ingram need to get down on the _ground, now._ "

Pierce turned, seeing her.

Nathan was a few feet away.

" _Nathan, no!_ " Finch shouted.

Ingram threw himself into her.

And then the explosion. A white-out noise and the ground shaking and then nothing.


	7. Chapter 7

The boardwalk was smoldering, deep, heavy swaths of smoke thickening the air. His ears were ringing. Felt hands on his shoulders-- then one transfer beneath his lower back, easing him into a sitting position. He hurt. It would have been worse if that support hadn't been there.

Even before his eyes cleared he knew it was Reese.

There was a streak of soot down the other man's cheek and his eyes were hooded as his head turned, scanning the area around them.

"Nathan." Finch whispered.

Reese's eyes dropped to his, dark and pained, an answer.

Finch struggled to his feet, lances of agony sending black streaks stabbing across his vision. He blinked them back. "Nathan." He called. "Nathan!"

A woman lurched into him, leaving red streaks down his coat. Blood. Screaming, panic, injuries and the high thready wail of sirens; fear turned the air sharp as a razor-edge.

He stumbled forward. _Not again not again not again..._

Crumbled brick turning the ground tricky, railing twisted into improbable shapes. The smoke clutched at his lungs. He coughed on another shout and Reese's hand was resting lightly on his arm, holding up or holding him back.

"Over here!"

Four men and a woman dragged a limp body out of the water, hauling them onto the brick.

Bishop sat up, shuddering. "There was a man." She let them steady her on her feet. "Brian Pierce. Is he-- did he--?" Her fingers clenched in her hair. "Oh, God."

Pierce, Pierce couldn't have been anything but dead, not that close to the explosion. But Bishop had lived. Because Nathan must have gotten to her. But if he hadn't been caught in the explosion Finch should be able to see him, and Nathan could swim, damnit, his family had owned a pool and he swam like a seal and if he'd made it into the water then there was no reason why Finch couldn't see him.

"They'll be here soon." Reese said quietly. "I need to get you out of here." Finch shook his head. Unless Nathan got spun in the tail-end of the explosion. Wasn't fast enough to get himself over the railing and pushed Bishop in. Or--  Reese's grip tightened on his arm. "Finch. Let's go." He started to pull him towards his car. "I'll come back and look for him." But his voice, his voice sounded like resignation.

Finch shook him off. "Damn you, John, _no_." 

He felt his own shock reflected back as Reese flinched.

"Another one!" A man called.

They were hauling another body out of the water and onto the brick; damp blond hair covered his forehead. Finch's breath hitched. He started towards them, and as he got closer the air constricted in his lungs and white came roaring in at the edges of his vision-- because it was Nathan, still. Still, like before.

Nathan rolled over, coughing.

"Nathan!" Finch crashed to his knees. "Nathan-- are you--?!" He checked him over, frantically, running his hands down the soaked coat, crumpling up his shirt in his fist. "Are you--?"

His diaphragm shook with coughs. "Hell..." His hands wrapped around the remnants of the railing behind himself and he drug himself into a sitting position. "Hell of a day for a swim." He coughed on a laugh that sounded like a sob.

"You're not hurt, don't think you're hurt--"

Nathan swiped the back of his hand across his forehead and came away with blood. He stared at it, dazed. Damp hair tangling into his eyes, a red watercolor stain stretched across the width of his collar; a hard, uncontrollable shake to his hands.

"How-- incredibly, incredibly stupid. Reckless. You could have gotten yourself killed, you should have called out to her. Just four or five more feet and you, you'd be, I thought the explosion had--" All he could hear was the ringing in his ears, ghost rings--  he wasn't sure whether they were from the explosion or the one three years back.

"Damned _explosions_ ," Nathan muttered, "I _really_ hate them."

" _Then_ _what the hell were you thinking?_ " Finch edged up on a shout.

Nathan stared at him. "I'm fine, Harold," He said. Gently. "Are _you_ okay?"

All of a sudden Finch felt terribly, terribly tired. "I don't like losing people, Nathan."

He blinked. "Bishop?" Nathan asked, eyes flicking over the water.

"She's fine." Reese replied. He nodded to the left.

"Pierce?"

"He must have known about the death threats." Finch said. "After Bishop's mugging, he must have realized they were trying to set him up and asked to meet her." Finch stared at the water. "He should have contacted the authorities."

"Just... wanted justice for his sister." Reese said, mild with an edge. "People do what they have to when they lose someone."

What startled Finch weren't the words. It was the informative tone Reese used. Unconscious, unintended, Finch was sure, but Reese had neatly stripped him from the equation of people who had lost someone.

Even from the beginning on that park bench, it had been the one unifying connection between them.

"Jesus." Ingram said. "I was close to him."  He looked worn as an old coin; the shadows on his face had hollowed out his cheeks. _"Goodnight, Nathan"_ Finch said, every night, but the circles beneath his eyes were dark enough to make Finch wonder if Nathan had been sleeping at all.

"You saved Bishop." Finch told him.

He shook his head sharply. _Not enough lives,_ he'd replied-- but for Nathan, it was never enough. "I forgot how it felt," Nathan said, voice faded low and musing. "Saving people. We thought we were saving them by building a Machine. But that-- that's nothing compared to... what this is." He let his head fall back against the rails, shutting his eyes for an instant. "Tell me something, Harold," Nathan said, then echoed his old words. "Is it enough, 'sitting here, rescuing people, one at a time'?"

Finch started to answer.

"We should go." Reese said.

Bystanders were filtering into the park, a press of voices varying in levels of horror and anticipation; cell phone cameras flashed. An ambulance and four cruisers steered into the street.

Finch rose, gingerly. He could see Reese's car parked on the far end of Carl Shurz, near the abandoned taxicab-- the driver must have hurried towards the explosion along with the rest of the onlookers.

He steadied himself on the railings, felt Reese's hand hovering carefully. It was only when Finch glanced at him that he realized Reese hadn't given him a chance to answer.

Finch revolved and spoke to both of them. "I don't think it's entirely unwarranted to assume that they might be monitoring the airports. Until I can secure an anonymous means of transportation it's best if you stay in a safe house, Nathan." He thought he saw a flash of Control's innocuous-looking vehicles amidst the traffic, but when the light glinted off another car they were gone. "I'd like you to take him there, Mr. Reese."

He tilted his head.

"He's in the most immediate danger, and you are the best equipped to handle a threat should one arise."

**"** You," A man said, weaving in front of them. He reached out, towards Nathan; Reese shifted, subtle but perceptible. The man kept going. "You look like the tech guy, the dead one. Nath--"

Reese flipped his badge out-- " _Detective Stills"._ After a moment the man subsided into the throngs. "What about Bishop?" Reese said, scanning the crowd.

"I'll accompany her to a safe house."

"There are still hit men after her. Whoever's calling the shots is going to try again."

"She's out of danger for now. Temporarily, they think she's dead." He took a step towards the woman.

"F _i_ nch." Reese's fingers were twitching, a subtle, barely perceptible indication of agitation. Neither of them were saying it, but it had been close. Too close.

Smoke draped the air, turning the city across the East River into blurry, bare-boned skyscrapers. Finch held his gaze. "I'll stay in touch." He said. With something that that looked like conscious effort Reese's lips pressed together, and Finch limped towards the car under his uneasy watch.

* * *

Reese shut the door to the taxicab. The sounds of sirens and shouting leveled out, muffled and low. Finch had taken Reese's car and Reese and Ingram were in the taxi: Reese's car was more secure-- which Finch didn't know and Reese didn't tell--, and the cab provided excellent cover in the city.

He dug in his pockets, drew out a screwdriver and an X-acto. He stripped the front panel of the taxi.

"I can hotwire a car." Ingram commented.

Reese lifted his eyebrows.

"Exams were done and Harold wanted to hack into the Pentagon as a challenge. I thought I should show him a hack a little less risky." Ingram snorted slightly, either from the memory or because _hacking the Pentagon_ and _hotwiring a car_ were two phrases that were ridiculous when juxtaposed.

But that made Ingram the cautious one-- and he struck Reese as a worrier-- and Finch the more reckless one. And that, well. Reese wished _that_ struck him as more of a surprise.

"Can't be easy." Ingram said, after a moment. "Not knowing anything about him."

He didn't answer.

"It took me twenty three days to get him to tell me his name. Another thirty to get him to tell me his first." Ingram was shrugging into Reese's spare jacket, covering his soaked, bloody shirt-- the spare had come from the back of Reese's car, Finch had gotten fed up with having Reese return in tatters: " _you ruin suits so frequently I feel I ought to provide you with spares wherever you go..."_ He fumbled in his previous coat and withdrew a gun.

Reese glanced at it. There was something intangibly unsettling about Ingram wearing his coat and carrying his gun.

"Thought you could spare it." Ingram said, answering narrowed eyes. "Probably have one by your bed, under your sink, and in the glove box."

As well as the bathroom, the sofa, and the closet. "What were you planning to do with it?" Reese said.

Ingram eyed it. After its swim through the East River its efficacy was dubious. "I only play captive once." He said. "I'll die otherwise." Brave words; smart ones. And Reese was feeling that same obligatory spark of recognition towards Ingram that he'd felt for Finch, after Finch had moved towards what he knew was a bomb to save a stranger's life.

Reese located the red wire. Yellow. "When you're in the field," Reese said, without looking up, "there's no time for questions. If things go sideways you need to follow what I say."

"You want me to trust you." Ingram stated.

With his life, yes; with the rest, no. And in their line of work, that was the easy part. It was other things, Sencha green tea with one sugar and Eggs Benedict, that carried the real weight of trust. Reese dug holes in the insulation of the wires.

"You carry a badge," Ingram said, "But you're not a cop, you're a soldier. People like that do what they're told, when they're told; blackmail, espionage, murder; keeping someone locked up. It's for their country. Or the greater good. They do their job, whatever that turns out to mean."

Reese glanced at him; Ingram's expression was level, a statement.

"You're asking me to trust you. I will. For that reason."

There was a vaguely reflexive note in Ingram's words-- and just as, at some fine point, the word "soldier" stopped meaning all its finest ideals in the same way knights were referred to for their chivalry and shining armor, Ingram's patriotism had disintegrated by the sort of people who hid behind phrases such as "collateral damage". Reese's mouth twisted ironically. He and Ingram weren't so different, not really; in fact he was far less like Finch and far more like Reese than Reese would ever have expected. That went a long ways as to explaining why Reese hardly liked him.

He wove in and out of the sluggish traffic, checking the rearview intermittently. The sky was a gray blanket and it was misting faintly, droplets too fine to see turning the world beyond the windshield blurry.

His phone was ringing. "Yeah, Finch?" He hadn't meant to put an edge in his voice, but it was there.

A pause. "Everything alright?" Given the caution in his voice, it was a double question.

"Fine. What do you have?"

"Miss Bishop has relayed to me some rather interesting information. She doesn't know who gave the payoffs, but she's highlighted the most likely culprits. It's a short list." Finch tossed a couple names at Reese, then clicked off.

"Trouble in paradise?" Ingram asked.

A glint caught in the corner of the rearview. Two inconspicuous cars, same make, same model, trailing fifteen feet behind him. There was one on each lane directly to the left and right: they were flanking him.

The traffic was barely moving-- midmorning rush. He peered over his shoulder. The only thing he could see were dim figures, maybe the pointed shape of a gun. He and Ingram were providing excellent targets.

Reese made a decision. "We go on foot." He said, opening the door. Ingram clamored after him. Several people honked at them as they wove around the slow-moving cars; the driver behind his shouted something at him.

Car doors, not far away, opening then shutting.

Reese quickened his pace. He knew the area-- wouldn't have gone on foot if he hadn't-- and he steered them around the corner. A Subway huddled in the center of the street.

The stairway was clogged with people. Reese dodged purses, briefcases, startled bystanders; a cup of coffee slipped, turned the stairs into a misstep-and-fall surface underneath his feet.

They hit the bottom. Gray walls, sounds of distant screeching tracks, no waiting Subway. Reese propelled Ingram down the platform, slid his card through the turnpike-- Finch made sure he would be able to utilize any means of transportation-- and navigated them down another flight of stairs. The subway cars were already pulling away.

Reese grimaced. "Stay here."

"Don't get killed on my account." Ingram replied.

Reese paused for half of an instant before turning and heading the opposite way. He backtracked fast. He was flattening himself against the initial stairway when the two men emerged onto the platform.

Reese spun out from cover, grabbing one of the men by the collar and slamming him into the metal wall of the stairs. He dropped to the ground, unconscious. Reese felt something coming from the left and ducked the other man's blow.

A subway thundered into the stop.

Reese threw a punch; the operative caught his arm. He twisted Reese's arm behind his back and Reese slid out of the lock, the momentum propelling him backwards.

Behind them, shouts: _call 911--_ " _Crowd syndrome: no one intervenes," Finch had said once, and then shot him an appreciative look. "But that's why you're here."_

The man slammed into him.

Reese hit the side of the subway car hard. He grappled for the man's jacket, spinning them off the metal. They landed on the ground, the man's upper torso suspended off the platform.

Whirl of footsteps and voices behind them. With one hand he withdrew his shield and held it up behind himself.

"Tell me about your other teams." Reese said, keeping his eyes on the operative. "How many are there, where are they?"

He struggled; Reese pressed down and the man panicked, pawing at his jacket. "We-- called it in, two are heading here. Got two more going after the other target."

"Other target?"

He shook his head.

A slight pressure caused his upper half to dip, balanced towards the tracks. A rumble started up somewhere near the end of the tunnel.

"Ingram's partner." The operative panted. "The target's Finch, Harold Finch."

Reese's grip loosened.

The man twisted slick as an eel; in that single instant Reese had been flipped onto his back and their positions had reversed. Open air. Half-off the platform from the shoulders up, wild, disorienting surface-lessness, the heavy rush of air from an oncoming subway and the vibrations of it thrumming deep into his back.

Reese lashed his elbow to the side. A grunt of pain. He scrabbled at the operative's jacket, got a grip near the collar.

A thick blanket of air sweeping into the tunnel.

Metal-on-metal screech against the tracks.

Reese jerked his knee into the man's stomach, tightened his grip on the suit and heaved up and backwards. The momentum sent Reese rolling forward; the man flailed off-balance, tumbling over him and off the edge.

Reese pushed himself fully onto the platform.

The subway thundered through the tunnel, a dull rumble that smothered the sound of a scream.

Reese panted, felt the cold of the stone and the ground vibrating beneath him, heard the horrified voices behind him. He heaved himself to his feet and pushed past the crowd.

Ingram was pacing where he'd left him. "Are you--? Did you--?"

"He was wrong." Reese moved rapidly through another turnpike, up a flight of stairs. "You aren't the only target." He dialed Finch; it went to voicemail for the third time.

"Target?"

They were on 8th Ave. A subway heading towards Euclid Ave. slid into the stop and Reese stepped in. This time of morning, the subway was just as fast or faster than a car. He didn't need Finch's exact location, not yet: it was enough that they were speeding in the general direction of the safe house Finch would have been heading towards.

The subway rolled underfoot but Reese couldn't sit, his nerves were crackling reckless as live wires.

" _Reese."_ Ingram said.

"It's Finch. Control got to him." A teenage girl was eying him suspiciously, fingers half-frozen over her laptop.

His phone was ringing. "Carter?"

"Your girl called me.  Callie Bishop? She said a couple of armed men pushed a man who was helping her into a car. Finch?"

The subway lurched and Reese grabbed onto the pole in front of him. "Did Bishop get a number on the plates?"

"A partial. PJT5. I'll see if I can get the whole thing."

But even if she did, that would take time, too much. "Okay." He hung up. Beyond the windows cement and dark flashed by, the occasional sickly green of a platform as they passed, fast enough so it was rendered still-life.

"The plate," Ingram said, "What was it?"

Reese relayed the information, bringing up the GPS on his phone. In the corner of his eye he watched Ingram approach the girl.

"How much would you want for that laptop?" He fanned what looked like two thousand.

She passed him the laptop.

"What are you doing?" Reese asked. He glanced at his phone. Kesser Street and 74th Ave.

He balanced the laptop on his knees. "The police have license plate readers on their cruisers. They catalogue every plate that goes by, running it through their database. I'm hacking the database, seeing if that car gets run through. If it does, I'll track the location of the cruiser. It'll put us close to where he is."

"I already know where he is."

Ingram waved a dismissive hand. "Your tracker's a decoy."

"Decoy?"

The subway jerked to a halt.

"Where are you-- Reese, stop."

Reese went through the doors and onto the platform. The light off the fluorescent above him gave off sickly, filtered light, the bulb covered in cobwebs and years-old grime.

He wove around the side of a pillar and checked the transfer list. Two minutes, one would arrive for Queens-- eleven blocks from where the tracker pinged.

Ingram was at his side. "Wherever you're headed, he's not there. The first thing they would have done was sweep him for bugs. They probably planted his glasses on the first car that went by."

"You don't know that." A rush of air.

"And you don't have any doubt that that tracker is still on him?"

Reese thought of Root, how she'd discarded Finch's glasses at the foot of the New York Library.

Ingram chin jerked down at the silence. "I thought so." He dropped the laptop onto the bench several feet away and hit the keys. "I have a match. Lower East Side, 2nd Avenue."

"You can't be sure the partial is to the right car."

The subway roared into the tunnel, a wall of air tearing at Reese's coat, lifting Ingram's collar.

He stepped towards it.

Ingram blocked him. Reese stiffened. "If you get on that subway they'll be boarding a plane back to D.C. by the time you get there-- at _the wrong place._ "

Ingram was radiating righteous unmoving stubborness; Reese didn't want to leave Ingram, not with Control converging on the Subway, but he would.

Metal doors slid open to the subway cars.

"Wait--"

If Reese stepped forward, Ingram would try to stop him by grabbing his arm. Reese would twist Ingram's behind his back and shove him to the side, out of his way. Or Ingram would move in front of him again and Reese would twist his foot around Ingram's leg to unbalance him, making him stumble to the side.

Reese stepped towards the doors.

Ingram's hand shot out-- stopped short, a fraction of an inch before making contact. "Reese, stop. I know you're the best shot we've got. I wouldn't tell you something I didn't think was right."

People streamed into the subway cars.

Not for an instant did Reese doubt the depth with which Ingram cared for Finch-- what he doubted was Ingram's judgment, his decisions, his reasoning. What he doubted was trusting Finch's life with anyone but himself.

A subway rumbled overhead; Ingram's voice raised to a near shout. "For years I worked with people who ended up betraying both Harold and I. And after that I spent three more years looking them in the eyes. I damn well know how they think."

The doors were starting to close. If he reached out, he could catch one before it shut.

"God _damnit_ , Reese." Ingram snapped.

He couldn't even take Finch's leap of faith by proxy, because Finch didn't fully trust Ingram.

A judgment call.

Reese turned his back as the doors to the subway cars slid shut and made his way out of the Subway.

Ingram pulled up a database again as Reese navigated the hotwired car through the streets. "I'll see if I can get another location when we get closer." He said.

It wasn't misting anymore it was raining, a warm summer pound. Water sprayed against the side of the car.

"What will they do with him?" Reese found himself asking.

"Have him hack into the Machine," Ingram responded, fingers flicking across the keyboard. "or rebuild one. Maybe force him to finish mine."

Force. They wouldn't have leverage like a son against Finch as they had with Ingram. And Finch would never help them. Reese had been in the CIA long enough to know all about the government's many dark rooms. His hands tightened on the wheel.

He felt Ingram's eyes on him.

"You care about him." Ingram said. A statement, realized and edged with chagrin.

Reese met his gaze.

The laptop beeped. Ingram's eyes jerked back to the screen. "Alright, two minutes ago-- Kingsly Street."

They were close. _He_ was close.

Reese took an illegal right, went straight and shot through an intersection. They spun round the corner: glassy office buildings, both sides, a predictable unmarked sedan with a license plate that read "PJT5839".

"This car probably won't be much use afterwards." Reese said, drumming the steering wheel. "Once I get Finch we'll need to move fast." He fumbled in his pocket and tossed the X-acto to the right.

Ingram snagged it out of the air. "What do you want me to do with this?"

 "Didn't you say you knew how to jack a car?"

"Pick of the lot?"

"Don't be choosy."

Ingram had already guessed what he was going to do. He reached backwards and buckled on his seatbelt.

Reese swung out so he was approaching from the side. Then he tamped his foot on the gas and hoped to God it was the right car.

Shrill of metal and glass breaking and the jarring arc of motion as the tires careened across pavement. The impact juddered deep into his bones; the air bag slammed into him, sending a wall of agony through his chest.

But he'd braced for it. Reese gave himself six seconds to get his vertigo back and catalogue his injuries-- a broken rib, possibly two, blood running hot down his collarbone-- before shoving the door open.

A ramming noise. The driver's side of the sedan swung and a man staggered out, face drenched in blood. He turned, clumsily lifting his gun. Reese took him out.

A door shutting behind him: Ingram.

The sedan's rear door opened and a man stumbled through it, dragging a figure with him. The operative had his gun lodged against Finch's head.

Reese swung his arm in a steady arc and shot the operative in the head. "Get down." He shouted at Finch.

Blur of motion from the opposite side. He dropped to the ground as bullets hailed into the taxi. Pain spiking through his chest as he rolled under it; a hissing noise. Something metal dug into his back as the tires deflated. He leaned around the edge of the rubber, remembering the man's position in his mind's eye, and shot blind. A grunt of pain. Thud.

Footsteps coming around the side of the cab, stopping. Quiet. Reese crawled to the other front wheel, suit scraping like sandpaper against the asphalt. Finch was sprawled on one side of the sedan. Glimpse of shoes moving towards him.

Reese started to roll out from underneath the car. The man saw him, and Reese saw the same decision in his eyes as he'd had to make himself before: if the mission went sideways, take out the target. The operative swung towards Finch.

Reese got the gun out from under himself and shot the man in the back.

Finch stood. His suit was soaked from the rain and he looked pale, raw, vulnerable without the glasses.

His expression flared with alarm.

Reese flattened himself against the side of his car as bullets sprayed past him. Glass crunched as the man behind him shifted; Reese knew the gun was aimed at his back sure as he knew he wouldn't be able to turn in time.

Even as he moved he waited for the bite of a bullet.

A gunshot.

The operative was on the ground, blood seeping from the hole in his chest.

Reese swung around.

Ingram's hands were clenched around the gun.

There was a lethal quality to the stillness and the lower floors of the surrounding offices had been reduced to shattered glass and fragmented windows; a large plate suddenly unbalanced, arcing away from its frame and smashing on the ground. Finch's eyes were wide and shocked as he leaned against the side of the sedan.

Reese took several careful steps forward. "Ingram." He said levelly. "Give me the gun."

He shuddered, and the high-thrumming crackle to the air leached away. The sound of multiple car alarms going off were beginning to register; up above, there were gray figures hovering near the windows. Reese felt the adrenaline crash start, threatening to turn his limbs boneless.

"Here." Ingram said, thrusting it away from himself. "Take it." Reese's fingers closed around the gun and Ingram jerked his chin down in a brusque nod. "Call it even."

"We need to go."Reese said. He turned towards Finch. "Are you okay?"

"Hell of a close call," Ingram muttered, voice shaking.

"Perhaps a little more than close." Finch murmured.

There was something strange in his voice and it registered with Reese in one ruthless realization hard as a punch to the gut-- but this, this, of all their contingencies, this was never supposed to happen.

Reese caught him before he hit the ground.

"Finch--"

"Harold--"

Blood, soaking three layers of suit, puddling on the asphalt. Reese tore off his jacket and pressed it against Finch's abdomen.

That gunshot. The gunshot that had missed him. Ingram had already put a bullet hole in the source but Reese wanted to find him, someone, anyone, because his hands were good for breaking things not fixing them and he needed to fix this.

Finch let out a tattered gasp. "John."

"Harold--" Ingram was on his knees. "Damnit, _Harold._ I'll call 911. An ambulance, there's a hospital close by, I can get a, a--"

Reese slid an arm under Finch's back. "I need to get you to the car." He glanced at Ingram and the man jerked his chin towards the other side of the street. Reese wound his other arm around Finch's. "Not far. I'm sorry." He stood, pulling Finch with him, heard his whimper through clenched teeth as blood slid in sheets to the ground. Smell of rain on asphalt mixed with the burn of rubber and gunpowder. Droplets of red on Reese's shoes.

"Want you to know... I don't regret any of it..."

"Don't try to talk, Harold."

"Don't... tell me to shut up, Mr. Reese."

The door was thrown open to the backseat, Ingram was standing with one arm extended to help, and Reese couldn't move. After two dozen tests the CIA had told Reese he never panicked, but the fear had dropped straight into his stomach and all he could think was that Finch was going to bleed out in the back of a stolen car.

Finch reached up, caught Reese's shirt near the collar and balled it up in his fist. Finch raised his head, struggling to meet Reese's eyes. "Always said... sooner or later..."

That resignation, that reassurance, if that was what the hell Finch intended it to mean, got Reese moving. He swung the door farther open and helped Ingram ease Finch into the car.

Reese grabbed the edge of the door. "Later, Finch. It's going to be later."


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any medical inaccuracies are my own.

Reese cursed the excruciatingly slow traffic and red lights and city budget cuts that had left half the roads uneven and potholed, because each one elicted a low gasp of pain from the backseat. Ingram's voice was going low and incessant in an undertone, reassurances disguised as fragmented bits about the past: "...Olivia was giving me hell for working too much so I planned a dinner but then the babysitter got sick..."

Dr. Madani was out, he was working double shift halfway across the city.

"...you were free-- you were always free, benefits of a best friend with self-described difficulty with human interaction-- so I asked you to fill in."

Dr. Enright was out, she was on conference in Boston.

Reese swung around the corner: a line of cars spanning the road, morning traffic-press jammed along the street. It'd take an hour to get to Finch's private clinic; Finch didn't have an hour. There was a stabbing pain in Reese's chest and he told himself it was the broken rib.

But they had contingencies on contingencies. He scanned the street signs, then cut out of his lane under a storm of honking and into another.

"...came to the door armed with enough child-rearing books to fill a library, and I remember one title-- _Teenage Boys: Raising a Man That Matters._ Which aside from being a ridiculously self-flattering patriotic title was ridiculous because Will was _two_."

Reese reached for his phone.

"Dr. Tillman."

"It's John."

"J--" She stopped. "From... the support group with the third cup of coffee."

"We don't have much time and a friend of mine needs your help." Reese cut his eyes to the backseat. The interior of the car was too dark-- he could see the blood, couldn't see how much there was. "He helped me help you."

The windshields swayed across the glass, rhythmic as a heartbeat.

In the background _, a man was speaking: Dr. Tillman, woman in five with pulmonary..._

"Where are you?" She said, finally.

Reese gave her an address.

"My equipment--"

"We have everything you need."

The last time anything like this had happened Reese had been the one in the backseat and Finch had been the one in the driver's. _It's okay, John._ Finch'd said. _Hold on._

"...figured you'd be a total mess, but when we got back the kid was asleep, which was one in a million. Wouldn't know it now, but he was a terror as a toddler. Never thought Will would end up so..." And in the backseat of the car Ingram was giving up more information about Finch's life than Reese had ever heard or probably ever would-- apparently his favorite color was blue, he'd been a teenage hacker with a homemade computer and he'd been _the_ ARPANET hacker-- and Reese should have been straining his ears for every word but it didn't matter, none of it did.

They skidded to a stop in a reckless swerve.

Reese fumbled for the door handle.

"Where are we?" Ingram demanded. "Why aren't we at the hospital?"

Reese levered Finch out of the backseat.

Fifteen felt like a hundred.

He keyed in the code and struggled to maintain his balance as he navigated slick floors; he was taking Finch's full weight and Finch was sagging half-conscious against him, but his fingers were clenched tight round Reese's arm and somewhere in the back of his head he thought that this was good, had to be good-- if Finch was hanging on _that_ tightly then there was still time.

The closest bedroom had been outfitted with a crash table, for worse case scenarios.

Reese maneuvered Finch onto it as gently as he could. The lights flicked on, too bright.

Finch grimaced, shutting his eyes. "Mhm..."

Reese took his arm and laid it over the crumpled coat. "Keep pressure on this." He started to turn.

"John--" A hand, loosely clutching his arm. Finch's eyes flickered open.

"Finch. Finch," Reese said, _and why the hell couldn't he get his breath back?--_ "The bullet's still inside, going to have to get it out."

"...trust you."

It was a gift that came with splitting terror, the same weighted moment Reese had felt with Judge Gates and Scott Powell, knowing his actions would determine a good man's life. All he could ever do was bite down and hope he was what they needed him to be.

Reese gently dislodged Finch's hand, pulled the medical kit from the shelf above him and emptied the contents onto the bed. Gauze, tweezers and a scalpel and disinfectant. His bloody hands left smears across the sheets as he raked through the supplies.

Footsteps.

Ingram pushed past him. "We need to get him to a hospital--"

"We can't go to hospitals." He located a syringe.

"Reese." Ingram planted himself in front of Finch. "I'm taking him to--"

Reese shot out a hand and got Ingram's arm and twisted, hooked his leg around the other man's and unbalanced him. Ingram stumbled to the side. Reese stepped around him and uncapped the pain medication, tore open the wrappings to the syringe.

Finch's veins looked blue and thready. Reese's hands were shaking. He paused, gave himself three seconds to get his training under control and then depressed the plunger.

Fingers tightening around his arm. "For god's _sakes,_ Reese--"

He whipped around and slammed Ingram into the wall. There was a frozen half-instant of nothing and Reese was waiting, _waiting_ for Ingram to hit him: he wanted that clean burn of pain, something physical to latch onto. Nothing came.

It was only in that moment Reese realized just how scared Ingram was.

"You can help me help him, or I can do this myself." Reese said eventually, his voice too quiet to be anything but even. "Your choice.

Ingram's jaw clenched. "What can I do?"

He jerked his chin towards the doorway. "Fridge, get two packages of O-negative." Of course they had blood, their line of work; Finch had acquired it the way he did everything else-- subtlety and efficiently-- and stored it in strategically-placed safe houses. O-negative for Finch, B-positive for Reese. Finch always had more B-positive stocked.

Reese started setting up an IV.

Finch shifted on the table. Blood had never bothered Reese. But there was something fundamentally wrong about it when it involved Finch-- Finch, with his dislike of violence and firearms, his disbelief at the idea of poking someone in the eyes, who'd looked at Reese, the moment after Reese had saved Finch and a teenage girl by shooting a hit man, not with relief but utter shock.

"...occurs to me," Finch murmured, eyes closed, "that I have never thanked you."

Reese got the bag hooked up and did his best to throw a teasing lilt into his voice. "You can thank me later."

There would be a later.

Finch's head slumped into a nod.

A shadow slanting into the room and then footsteps, softer than Ingram's. Reese turned.

She was standing in the center of the doorway; her lips were pressed together, she had one foot turned outwards, towards the exit, but there was a reason he hadn't let her take a life: she was and always had been a doctor.

The plastic from the IV bag crumpled as Megan inserted the drip chamber, expertly moved the roller's clamp. She collected supplies; he placed them on the table beside the crash cart. Her hands hovered above the scalpel. "I'm not a surgeon, John. Abdominal wounds-- there can be complications--"

He nodded.

Megan pulled on a pair of gloves. "I'll need help."

And they worked in silence, Megan painstakingly extracting the bullet, repairing the damage. "...scissors... gauze... sutures..." Ingram came in and placed the O-negative on the table, slipped on a pair of gloves and assisted; Reese did everything she asked, kept a blank-roaring whiteout noise running through his head as the bloody gauze filled up the waste bin. Most people he'd worked with in the CIA had had mental off-switches they could flick; Reese's had never worked as well as the best agents'.

After she'd cleaned and sutured the wound they carefully transferred him to the bed, leaving streaks on everything they touched with blood-slick hands.

Megan was stripping off her gloves. "Could have been worse." She said absently, checking the IV. "Small caliber bullet, didn't puncture any organs. But you should keep an eye on him. If there's any problems--" She hesitated, went on. "I'm not far from here... and you probably know when I'm on shift."

"Thank you." Reese said.

"Your ribs. I can look at them."

"You've done enough."

 She took a step towards the door, stopped; she revolved halfway, till he could only the part-shadow sliver of her face. "What did you do with him?"

Ingram was leaning against the wall, gaze focused on the bed-- but that tilt of his head: he was listening. Reese was suddenly very, very grateful, for the decision he'd made all those months ago. "Mexican prison." Reese said. "He'll be there for a long long time."

Megan nodded to herself. Maybe "grateful" hadn't been the right word. Possibly recognized, or relieved; in any case it was one of those decisions that still allowed him to look in the mirror every morning. He felt a soft nudge as she reached out, touching his arm. "Your work. I don't think it's that different from mine."

Dr. Tillman left.

Reese could hear Finch's breathing evening out into an uneasy sleep and there was a stillness to the room that Reese couldn't peg as peaceful or inanimate. Ingram was spreading the blanket across the bed. Ingram began silently cleaning up the crash cart, tucking away the medical equipment, rolling the IV stand against the wall.

Reese breathed in. The air rushed into his chest like a wave and the adrenaline crashed down, turned his limbs weak and boneless. His legs hit the front of the chair; he let them fold beneath himself.

But for now. At least for now, it would be sooner, not later.

* * *

He woke with a crick in his neck. He was slumped into the depths of the chair, the only light coming from a lamp in the corner; he didn't think he had been the one to turn it on. He stood, stiffly, and went to the bed. Finch was so still. Reese reached down, checked his pulse: light but steady, like the beat of a bird's wings.

_Close._

He gathered the necessary supplies and located the latrines. Fluorescents reflected off the marble facade, giving the room an odd, wobbly look. He washed his hands. Scrubbed till the sink was rimmed in pink. Left the tap on because the silence was buzzing at his ears.

It had been close.

During his time with the Agency he'd made a practice of reviewing ops like a slideshow, picking through his mistakes, cataloguing them, recognizing them. It had been a while since he'd used the same technique as a guilt-trip.

He worked as he thought, checking himself over for injury. His fingers brushed across a cracked rib.

First, the park-- Carl Shurz, that sedan. There had to have been some sign of it. When Finch had stiffened, eyes focusing over Reese's shoulder: that had been it. He'd been busy trying to deflect Ingram's _"is it enough?"_

The other rib was broken.

That fight after the crash. Finch's expression flashing onto alarm. If he hadn't dove against the taxi for cover.

The rib hadn't punctured anything.

If he had thrown himself towards the shooter. Or towards Finch, covering them both.

Dried blood over the slash across his collarbone. He washed, disinfected, bandaged.

He'd heard the footsteps coming around the car before he rolled out to meet one of the other operatives. If he'd taken Finch's shooter out then.

Reese binned his bloody coat in the waste can.

Too close.

Reese returned the way he came, slipping into the main room. The curtains to the windows were drawn and it was dark, nothing but deep blue and moonlight and shadows. He'd spent hours collapsed in that armchair; at some point he must have drifted off. He leaned against the side of the wall. Despite the sleep he felt tired, the same dead-weary exhaustion he'd felt after a mission went sideways and people got killed, after saving Elias, after losing one of their numbers.

Tapping noise, to his left. He turned his head.

Ingram was on the floor, legs sprawled, back nestled against the lower edge of the sofa. He caught Reese's eye. "Didn't want to wake anyone," He said, after a moment, "and you never left." There was something very close to approval in his voice.

Reese scanned the windows. A few street lights on, light puddling across asphalt; the occasional flicker as a moth or a shadow passed in front of the bulb.

"It's Karen Gray." Ingram said abruptly. "Those names you mentioned that Bishop told him. I did some work. There's a reason why she has a good success rate: it's not the first time she's changed the outcome of a case. If I can find the evidence-- and I can, given time-- more than one or two wrongfully indicted people could be acquitted."

"Good."

"I... soaked your coat in the sink. Couldn't remember whether you're supposed to use hot water or cold. 'Liv always used to--" He stopped.

It was strange, speaking to someone that didn't keep their personal information in a lockbox. Jarring, exposed. "Your wife." Reese noted.

Ingram nodded. "We separated a long time before the-- before the government set me up." He shook himself. "Hot. I ran hot."

Hot set stains; cold didn't. Reese knew a dozen ways to get rid of bloodstains, but he didn't mention them.

One of the bookshelves had been dramatically emptied: there were stacks of novels across the floor, some open, some not; the bookshelf had been shoved against the door. A few kitchen chairs were pushed beside it, completing the makeshift barricade.

"Expecting a war?" Reese said.

"They have more than one invincible soldier on their side of things." There was a murky quality to the low light and it was difficult to tell whether Ingram was embarrassed or aggrieved. Although blocking the door was hardly the more hazardous coping alternative than a good deal of others. For someone being pursued by the same people that had held them captive for years, Ingram was dealing remarkably well.

Several strands of Ingram's hair were mattered with dried blood. "Might have a concussion." Reese said. He debated locating some ice, then decided Ingram likely knew where it was.

"No way to tell. Obviously... dead men don't go to hospitals."

Reese held himself still. Because he was waiting. Waiting for Ingram to hurl bitter but honest blame towards him, because it was what he'd been doing himself since the gun went off: _You. You should have kept this from_ ever _happening_.

Slowly, Ingram spread his arms out, and shrugged his shoulders down. "No." He said. "Not now, anyway."

With the books on the floor, it looked-- it looked like the first floor of the Library, and there was quite possibly the off chance that that was no coincidence. It occurred to Reese with a mix of anxiety and satisfaction that the Library was the closest thing that any of them had to a "home".

Reese's phone rang. Six missed calls: he must have slept through them.

"John." Carter said. "We pulled security footage from Kingsley Street. Is Finch alright?"

"He was-- shot. I found him a doctor."

A pause. "I'm sorry, John."

Blame was a nick; sympathy was a sharp twist of a knife. "You said 'had'."

Shuffling of papers. When Carter spoke her voice was clipped: business. "We had it for three hours. Then a lot of guys dressed a whole lot like you came and took it. They're all over the Precinct, asking about the bombing in Upper East Side. Don't know who you pissed off this time... Fusco says they smell like government. I think he's right."

"Can you run interference for us?"

"I'll do what I can." She must have sensed him start to hang up. "If there's anything I can do."

He tinkered with the phone for a few seconds. "I'll keep you updated on Finch's condition."

Ingram waved a hand towards the door after Reese had disconnected the line. "They don't stop. Not so long as we're alive." His mouth hardened into a straight line; he reached behind his back.

Reese's gun was out and leveled at Ingram's chest and the deformed shadow of the barrel was stretched across the wall. His pulse was racing, every muscle taut for a fight. There was a fine-crackling tension beneath his skin, insistent and uncomfortable. Reese was a good enough agent to know exactly when his nerves were shot.

"If I were going to kill you," Ingram said calmly, "Sure as hell wouldn't be from ten feet away."

Slowly, Reese returned the gun to his side.

"How is he?"

He wanted people to stop asking something he couldn't answer. "We'll see."

Ingram inahled, a deep ragged shake to it, and tucked his chin down in a nod, as if trying to deflect a blow.  Reese remembered that blind look of fear in his eyes against the wall: not of Reese, but for Finch. _You're not the only one who's lost someoe._ If Reese were very honest with himself-- or perhaps very indulgent, anyone's best guess-- it hurt, seeing Finch see his friend alive, while Reese would never get the chance again with Jessica.

Ingram gathered what he'd been reaching for: two glasses and a bottle of liquor. They hit the coffee table with a muffled thud. "Look like you  need a drink," He said, which Reese knew from experience was a polite way of saying, _I need a drink._ "Ever been to college?"

"Been there."

Ingram arched an eyebrow, didn't comment. "We had this game called 'I never'. Rule was you would say something and if you had done it, you drank. If you hadn't, you didn't."

Reese leaned back against the wall again.

Ingram shot him an unimpressed look. He shook the bottle faintly: forty-year-old Bowmore. Probably as expensive as a nice leather chair or one of the ridiculously highbrow bespoke suits Finch bought Reese but he never wore. And it didn't surprise him one bit: Finch knew wine, Ingram knew whiskey.

"Your friend got shot," Reese said flatly, "and you want to play a game."

The exasperated sigh ruffled Ingram's entire frame. "Yes, Reese. I would appreciate doing something other than sitting at the bottom of a bottle."

_Distracting, he's distracting me,_ Reese realized, with a flicker of chagrin. Off of Finch. The guilt and the gunshot. He wondered if he should reevaluate Ingram: his character profile hadn't involved this level of consideration. There was a quality about Ingram that demanded self-introspection, which, depending on the person on the receiving end, was either enlightening or unsettling.

After a moment Reese stepped forward and slid to the ground, back against the front of the armchair across from the sofa. It occurred to Reese that their refusal to utilize the furniture might be worthy of some sort of psychobabble dissertation on self-imposed punishment, but he moved the coffee table out of his way with his foot and tamped down on the thought.

Ingram filled a glass with a fast expert flourish and waggled it at Reese. The liquor glinted gold, lethal in the poor light. He still kept an empty bottle on the top kitchen shelf in his apartment, so it could keep a careful, watchful eye on him throughout the day-- kept it so he could see how far out of the gutter Finch had dragged him, how far down he could still go if he slipped up. Now seemed like an appropriate time to schedule a return date, just in case he was being optimistic about the blood loss or potential infection or complications or-- Reese took the glass.

Ingram filled his own. "Lead by example. I never... had a kid." He drank. "Your turn."

Reese didn't drink; Ingram hardly looked surprised. "Never..." He took a guess. "Had an affair."

"One for every time?" He smirked. "Never had an affair because I never actually _got_ married."

Reese flicked his eyebrows and tilted the glass back. "I never drank till I blacked out."

Ingram took another pull the same moment Reese did. And yes, maybe Reese could have guessed that: because it was in the way the other man held the glass, accepted the burn of liquor down his throat like a promise for oblivion-- same as Reese had done on too many long nights.

"Never ran away from home." Ingram announced, then tilted his glass back.

Reese didn't. Ingram threw him a look of surprise. "Before today, never killed anyone." Reese said; he swigged one down.    

Ingram rubbed his thumb along the rim of his glass. Drank. He looked up. "Never been in love." He hesitated, then took a short swig. Which, if Reese were asked, made Reese think that Ingram hadn't. Not really.

Love knew no hesitation. He'd learned that a long time ago.

Ingram was waiting.

The white off the pages of the books gleamed like bones. Reese tilted his glass back, felt the fierce burn of it down his throat.

Silence.

"What happened?" Ingram asked quietly.

"Against the rules." Reese responded.

His eyes were dark and appraising. "Never... lost the person I loved?"

Reese let it burn through his throat again. "Still a patriot." He knocked back the glass.

Ingram eyed him. He didn't move. "Government never locked me up." An explanation.

"Government never tried to kill me." Reese countered. Drank.

"Never regretted the things I _did_ for the government." Ingram answered. He didn't drink.

Reese met his gaze. Drank. "So why do you care about the irrelevant list?"

Ingram sat up straighter. "That's why you're here? Redemption?"

"Rules." Reese reminded him.

He leaned back. "Rules." He agreed. "Ask again, Reese."

"Never tried to save the irrelevant list... because no one else would?"

Ingram raised his glass. "Because everyone's relevant to someone." He added, like an afterthought.

_Because everyone's relevant to someone._ Reese looked at Ingram over the rim of the glass for a moment. He drank to that.

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Not explicitly stated, but Bear is staying with Leon during the ensuing fallout.  
> \- This chapter is a bit shy of 10k words. I considered splitting it into two chapters, but I decided the overall sequence worked better as one.

 The surface floated just out of reach.

When he opened his eyes he wasn't sure whether he was awake or not: the darkness felt the same, murky, molasses. But the cold bit at his uncovered arm and his eyes slowly adjusted to the sparse light from the lamp on the bed table.

Reese was draped over a chair in the corner; he looked haunted, too much like the bleached-boned version of the John Reese he had first met.

"You should get some rest, Mr. Reese," he slurred.

"I could say the same, Harold."

He was already slipping back under.

*

Reese was in the room when he drifted up again: more stubble, tense and stiff.

"Didn't know I paid you to slack-off," Finch rasped.

"I'm using up my vacation days."

The room was different; the chair was different. The light off the lamp was blue-silver instead of orange-gold, different than the last one. "We're not in the same safe house, are we?"

Reese shook his head: a small, indirect flick.

"They're looking for us."

This time he nodded.

*

A chair, creaking; softness, like a bed. The weight of too many blankets and pillows. Finch blinked away the sluggishness and lifted his head.

"Mr. Reese?"

A hitched breath, like someone waking. "No..." Nathan's voice was gravelly. "It's your other world-saving partner."

Finch's eyes were adjusting to the murk. Nathan was sprawled across one of the armchairs; a closed laptop was on his knees and a book slid off the lid. Finch felt a skewed sense of deja vu-- skewed, because it was Reese who had always been in Nathan's position the previous times Finch had gotten hurt.

If this kept on, Finch was going to make the trivial but crucial mistake of calling one by the other's name.

Nathan stood, paced to a table and returned with two glasses of water. "How are you feeling?"

His wound ached; he felt exhausted. But his mind was clear. "Better." With vague amusement, he eyed the blankets and pillows. Most people would have fetched comfort food; apparently Reese and Nathan had raided the linen closet.

There were haphazard stacks of books strewn across the floor, some opened, some closed-- as if someone had tried then abandoned an attempt to read them. A chess board half played and a deck of cards; two empty glasses with puddles at the bottom. Finch was relieved to see that neither appeared to have contained alcohol.

"You and Mr. Reese must have been getting along." Finch said.

Nathan offered him that rumpled, full-shouldered shrug. "He didn't shoot me, and I didn't hit him over the head with a Jack Daniels. So I'd say so, yes." He paused. "We had to lie low for a while after they found the last safe house."

Control was getting closer. Finch tended to think that his, Reese's, and Nathan's continued existences were testament to the government's ineptitude, but so long as those like Hersch were looking for them, there wasn't a safe place in the city.

"Where is he?"

"R--" Nathan's head came up; he held out one hand, tapped his ear piece. "Yeah?" He listened for a moment, then grabbed the corner of his laptop before it fell to the floor. His fingers flickered along the keys. "James Street, Fourth floor." Nathan cut the line and turned back to Finch. "Reese spent the first forty eight hours by... you. Coordinated with your partners in the NYPD. Situation came up two days ago and he's been dealing with it since."

Four days. Every day that went by, Control would only get closer.

"I thought-- for awhile we weren't sure--" Nathan stopped. "You got lucky."

Finch wondered just how close of a call it had been; too close, if the draw near Nathan's eyes was any indication. "When Mr. Reese and I started our operation," He said, as carefully as the situation would allow, "we didn't particularly have longevity in mind."

His mouth tightened.

"Do you think that's what we're doing?" Finch asked abruptly, thinking of Nathan's first words. "Saving the world?"

"I stopped worrying about whether we were or weren't a long time ago, Harold."     

There was a flint to Nathan's voice that he wasn't sure how to process: as anger, as resignation, as ambivalence. Finch slowly eased himself into a sitting position. But it had been Nathan. Nathan had been the one to ask, the day the world changed, what exactly they could do to stop the people who had taken the Towers down.

He watched Nathan contemplate the inevitable, a truth so glaringly large that, all along, he'd hoped Nathan wouldn't see. Then again, he'd hoped not to end up on the wrong side of a bullet, either.

"Don't you think it's about time we finish what we started on that ferry, Harold?"

There had been a moment, when Nathan had asked him for the irrelevant list back. If he had said yes. If he had suggested finding a man such as John Reese.

They wouldn't be here.

"No." Finch said, unequivocally.

"I go in front of a camera-- _we_ do that-- and we can bring them all down." Nathan was standing; pacing.

"If you do that you'll have to reveal the Machine. They'll shut it down, Nathan." They had been here before, too many times: same argument, same stone-worn rhythms and stakes.

"They did this." He motioned towards the bed. "To you. They murder people, lock them up. And we just move on."

"And the irrelevant list? That doctor, Megan Tillman. She was one of the people we helped. Callie Bishop and whoever it is Reese is helping now. We have saved hundreds of lives over the past three years. If you expose the Machine no one will get saved anymore." Except it wasn't the same argument: déjà vu and mirrors were prevalent things but the former was skewed and the latter held cracks.

Finch realized, with shattering clarity, the depth of the decisions he'd made. Because this time it was him arguing for the irrelevants-- for the lives they'd changed, the people they'd saved.

Nathan didn't answer.

Even before the Machine, they had argued-- not with the same bitter edges, but with the same hard jabs, rarely feinting. Finch tamped down on the point that it was Nathan who had asked him to stop the terrorists, Nathan who had changed the original mission. "I did think about it," He said instead. "I wanted to find everyone remotely connected to what happened on the ferry and destroy them."

A flinch in Nathan's steps. "But you didn't."

"People needed saving more."

He stopped pacing and slumped back into the chair. It occurred to Finch that he had never even said that he was glad Nathan was alive. Paper rustled as Nathan reached down, picking up the book that had fallen.

_The Ghost in the Machine._

"How long have you had that?" Finch asked, surprised.

"Few days after I got back to-- from the facility. I was checking the safe. Found this, tried reading it. Thought I might get some perspective. Didn't work."

"How far have you read?"

Nathan indicated a third of the book.

Finch reached out. "Let me see it." He rifled through the pages. It was near the end.

Nathan blinked at the photo.

_In the beginning..._

"You've got a strange sense of humor." Nathan said, softly.

Maybe he did. The past was a cruel thing. He thought of Megan Tillman, terrible coffee and Reese. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about what I could have done."

Nathan looked at him, running his thumb along the edge of the book very, very gently.

The light went on.

Reese was halfway into the room before Finch's eyes cleared, Nathan was speaking-- _what did I say about knocking?_ ; there were clatters as Reese grabbed things from the shelves and thrust them into an open duffel bag.

"Ingram, we need to move. Get--"     

"Mr. Reese." Finch said.

He turned. "Harold." His hands were frozen over pills, gauze, an intravenous line. Reese let out a small breath and his mouth edged into an almost-smile. "Good to see you awake."

"Good to see you." He thought about all the things he'd wanted to say after he'd been shot, all the things he hadn't. Reese's shoulders were tight, weight balanced forward on his toes: he was radiating stress that projected out as urgency. "Report, Mr. Reese."

Reese started moving. "They found us again." He lifted the laptop. "Were you using this?"

Nathan nodded.

Reese flipped the lid open and dumped Finch's half-full glass over it. "Left Fowler--" He threw the name at Nathan, it must have been their number. "--with Carter, came here. Destroy your phone."

Nathan was already dropping it into the water pitcher. "Give me your keys. I'll get the car."

Reese tossed him the keys; Nathan snagged them out of the air. It was so seamless it was jarring. Almost as if the two had become-- "No," Nathan said, almost flippant but altogether seriously, answering before Finch could ask. He took the bag as he went out.

Reese knelt and pulled another bag from under the bed; it rattled like the metal of guns. "Do you have a wheelchair around here?"     

"I can walk."

Reese's expression indicated that he had no reservations about bodily carrying Finch out otherwise.

"First closet down the hall." He relented.

The remnants of the pain medication had him dizzy and nauseous but of course they weren't enough to counteract the jabs of pain at every moment; the stairs down the drive were bad, the bite of the air was worse. By the time Finch was in the backseat they were both breathless.

Reese navigated the streets in an inconsistent network of left and right turns, seemingly to nowhere. There was the obvious thought, the figurative elephant in the room, of course, but Finch didn't want to be the one to say it first.

"We considered that." Nathan said, and there: even before they had become friends-- although Finch had taken months, possibly even years to admit that that was what Nathan was-- Nathan had been able to read him better than anyone else. "I managed to hack into the frequency Control's people were using to communicate on. Their orders had changed: kill, not capture."

Which meant-- that they no longer needed him to break into or build a Machine. "You were nearly finished with it when we extricated you from the facility." Finch said. "Your Machine."

"I worked on it... as slowly as I could. Imagine by now they'll have their techs all over it; and I did enough to leave a blueprint of how to finish."

There was nowhere to run, then: if the orders had changed then Control was nearly finished with it, and if they ran they'd be found. The pure irony of it. He thought of those books and the chess board and the deck of cards in that room, envisioned the three of them holding out in some safe house for an indefinite period of days or weeks, till the door came busting down.

Finch didn't mind dying for the numbers; he didn't mind dying for Reese. But from Control... "Have you checked on Will recently?"

"He's in Boston." Nathan's face went blank. "He was called away on a sudden medical conference."

The windshield wipers switched on, a damp-scraping noise across the glass. Reese's eyes flashed in the rearview as he scanned behind them.

"Where are we going?" Finch asked him.

He hesitated. "I was hoping you knew."

* * *

Except Control wasn't a tightening noose, they were a closed-box room, the air supply slowly being cut off, every exit door being locked, bolted, and sealed shut.

They based at another safe house; over the next days Reese continued to work the numbers. Finch let Nathan take over the more direct aspects of the technical support-- finding addresses, tracing money trails-- and ran interference for Reese. But Control had done it before and they were doing it now: monitoring the NYPD scanner. The threats came two-sided, from Control and the threat to the number; close-calls were commonplace with Reese, but they were occurring every time he went out. Fusco informed them that Control seemed to suspect a mole from someone in the NYPD. After Carter was nearly exposed because she refused to leave one of their numbers before getting them out of danger, Finch suggested that they stop requesting the detectives' assistance until the situation was resolved.

"Agreed." Reese said, with the grace not to mention that there might only be one resolution to the situation, and then none of it would matter anymore.

They'd been relying on the detectives' help for a long time. It had been a while since he and Reese had operated this blindly.

Finch was faking a medication run at a clinic in Queens-- on paper, of course, but any lead to dilute Control's resources was a sound one-- and Nathan was throwing out ideas to stop them-- _sabotage my Machine, live somewhere with strict surveillance laws,_ Nathan had always been a brainstormer-- when Reese called, breathing hard.

"Need a fast route through Uniondale."

Finch brought up a map of the streets. "Go through Franklin Square--"

"Russians are that way."

"Alright, then you can head back past Carle Place--"

"Can't, Control's that way, Finch."

Finch's fingers froze over the keyboard. In the background, gunfire and the high, panicked voice of the woman they were helping-- Jennifer Cole. "I can send one of the detectives. I'll try to disrupt the frequency Control is using to communicate, although that will take some time."

A pause. "That's alright, Harold."

"Mr. Reese." Finch started to stand. Nathan was staring at him across the table.

Footsteps, the metallic clang of bullets.

"John?" He snatched the car keys lying on the counter.

"What are you going to do?" Nathan followed him into the hallway. "Even if Control wasn't looking for you you're still injured. Wait half an hour. If he hasn't contacted you by then..."

Except Finch didn't wait; Reese didn't, either.

He hadn't driven this fast for a long time-- maybe months ago speeding away from a parking structure-- and every abrupt stop or curve to the road sent jabbing pain through his abdomen. There were few things he despised more than the feel of panic: nerves colliding like heated molecules, knowing his adrenal cortex levels were rising helplessly and being unable to stop it.

His phone was ringing.

"Finch." Reese said.

His lungs opened up and he slid jerkily into another lane. "What happened?"

"61st Thomas Street." He hung up.

A car honked at him as he cut them off. He replayed the dull note in Reese's voice-- because Reese, Reese called bullet wounds flesh wounds and stab wounds scratches.

Sixty-first Thomas Street was a library, small and brick and suburban. Scattered trees, manicured lawns, well-paved roads. It would have been picturesque if Reese hadn't been leaning against one of the trees in a blood-soaked shirt.

Finch struggled out of the car. He reached for him.

"It's not mine." Reese said, stepping past Finch. He got in the car.

Finch didn't ask about the blood as he drove them back to the safe house. He didn't ask where Jennifer Cole was. He didn't need to.

The car stalled outside the safe house: subtle, inconspicuous, like most of them. It was misting again, although possibly it had never actually stopped: they were still barely past a damp Spring's threshold.

Reese's face was pale and hollow; he looked like he hadn't shaved in days.

"Wasn't your fault, John."

"I thought--" Reese coughed, roughly. "I thought it would be safer to try to break through the Russians than Control. Was wrong."

Finch heard the pained resignation in his voice-- and he well-knew how few countermeasures there were to resignation.

"Do you remember what you said?" Reese murmured, "after the explosion that killed Matt Duggan?"

Finch remembered. He remembered the jagged taste of regret, a replay of "almost" that juxtaposed images of Matt and the stroller with Nathan and the ferry. _Failure,_ he'd told Reese, _is not an option._

Finch reached over, cautiously, and placed his hand on Reese's arm. Reese didn't lean in to the touch, but he didn't move away, either.

They stayed like that as the low-hung clouds came in and dark whips of wind went spinning through the tree limbs.

* * *

Nathan hurried into the main room. Finch was already sitting up: he'd had bad experience with that alert expression of Nathan's, knew it from MIT days when Nathan would jostle into the room with blazing ideas about date suggestions or quick money schemes. _...double date? You'll like this girl, she's brilliant and she has an unreasonable disregard for anything that isn't an algorithm; got everyone to bet against you for a coding war against Shawn Harris, but we both know you could beat him plastered, not that, you know, you ever actually get..._

"The Machine." Nathan grabbed a chair, pulled it from the table and dropped into it. There were still lines around his eyes when they'd told him they'd lost their number; there was still the taut dangerous stance to his shoulders from when Reese had looked at Nathan-- anticipating? wanting? waiting?-- for a fight.

Finch was sitting at the table with his laptop open, erasing footage of Reese from the real estate firm where Miss Cole had worked; Reese was on the floor several feet away, cleaning a gun with a detached, obsessive focus.

"You have always said that the public outcry would be so great that they would shut it down." Nathan continued. "Special Counsel is terrified for two reasons: that, and because if they do, the best they can hope for is a padded cell."

Nathan went on before he could restart their worn argument. "I'm not talking about exposing your Machine. I'm talking about revealing mine."

Finch's fingers hovered over the keyboard. Nathan's head tilted back: too somber to be smug, but he managed.

"It may be a front." Nathan said. "But the public won't know that. We'll take them down, and your Machine keeps giving out the numbers. Call it a win-win."

"Creative," Reese said, "but it doesn't stop them from revealing the actual Machine."

"They won't. They're no more willing to endanger the Program than we are. The woman who heads Control is a-- patriot." Nathan pronounced the word clumsily, as if it didn't fit well on his tongue.

They had fascinated each other in philosophy class-- _is there a God? are morals a construct?_ ; Nathan had been the black and white to Finch's gray, so wonderfully, brilliantly sure of good and bad, right and wrong. He'd been realizing it all along, but it hit him then: just how much the Machine, and everything that came later, had taken from Nathan.

Reese stood, moving towards the table. There was a slow burn of something in his eyes.

"Your Machine isn't complete." Finch said.

"The people on their side of things will have done a lot of the work since-- and they'll have worked fast, there's a difference between a dozen coders and one. Even so. All we have to do is write the rest of the code that I would have had I had time to finish the Machine."

"It's offline. The public won't care about an inoperable attempt to spy on them."

Nathan shot him a weighted look.

Finch pushed his laptop to the side. "I assume it cannot be accessed remotely?"

"No."

"Do you know where it is?" Reese asked.

"Yes."

"That's assuming we can produce a compatible code in a very small time frame." Finch interjected. "And that's the least difficult part. I doubt they've left the server rooms unguarded."

"Not a safe bet," Nathan agreed. "but then bets never are."

Reese had one hand braced against the table and Finch finally had a word for the look in his eyes: hope. He could feel it in both Reese and Nathan, homing in on the possibility with the single-minded focus that had made Nathan a brilliant engineering counterpart and Reese an integral partner in their work.

At some point, Finch would have to decide whether it was wise to keep comparing the two men. Although that might be somewhat futile-- if he were as honest as he really should be with himself, the similarities were, in part, what had drawn him to John Reese in the first place. Because at the very heart Reese and Nathan were precisely the same: both white-knight idealists, wanting, above all else, to help people.

* * *

Nathan reproduced the last remnants of the code that he'd written-- and really, it was only an echo of Finch's; continuing it was the tricky part, like merging. Finch arranged a place in one of the dark back rooms as they split their time between working the numbers across the comm with Reese and finishing the code.

Control was moving in, closer as always: they forced them to relocate to three new safe houses, raided one of Finch's private clinics that Reese had retrieved antibiotics from the previous morning, pulled Callie Bishop in for questioning.

They lost another number.

Reese played decoy for Control, which was ludicrously reckless and wholly necessary. And he did it with a worrisome alacrity-- not explicitly stated, but Finch could hear it in the harshly satisfied pants after flesh-on-flesh thuds across the line.

The work with the numbers required daily hacking skills, but Finch had forgotten what it felt like to really code: black terminal boxes and lines towering up the windows; scrawl reflecting pale-white off his glasses and the walls around him. He'd forgotten the exhilaration and the exhaustion of it, the creation and the shape of it filling up the screen, the stiff back and aching neck and blur-grit feel when he blinked.

Over the course of two weeks he stopped only for food, bathroom, and scheduled sleeping breaks; and twice when the only sound across the comm was silence.

The first time, Reese checked in twenty minutes later, drawing in panting breaths. The second time, Reese stumbled through the door to the safe house as Finch was turning the ignition to the car.

There were soot streaks across his clothes and ash smudges turned his skin gray as an illness. "Set up," He said, on a ragged cough. "Control put Garcia's life in danger. Tried to take me out after I got him to safety. Ran into a warehouse. They set it on fire."

Finch made sure Reese was on the sofa before turning towards the kitchen to find him a cup of tea. His phone was ringing. Nathan leaned across the kitchen counter-- he was based at the table with a laptop-- and picked it up.

"New number." Finch said. Except he said it like a question.

But it could be anything. Just as sure as it could be a victim or a perpetrator it could be a victim being targeted by Control to set a trap, it could be an operative of Control's playing victim.

Nathan put his hand on his arm. "I say we go now."

"The code isn't done. We still have a week or more left to go."

"We might not have a week, Harold."

And if they charged into Control's facility too early it would be the last week they had.

Nathan leaned forward on his elbows. "Trust me?" He suggested.

Those words: asking one thing and saying a dozen others. Finch stood and returned to the sofa. Their phones were linked; Reese was holding his.

"New number." Reese said calmly. He stood, wobbling.

Finch replaced the phone with the tea. "Maybe we shouldn't take this one."

Reese fell back. "You pulling me out of the field, Finch?" His voice was a dry, raspy murmur. He waited.

Finch looked at him and forced himself not to blink; he felt Nathan's eyes on the back of his neck. It occurred to him that not wanting to "play God" was a coward's excuse for not wanting to take responsibility for the decisions he made.

"Yes."

* * *

"Impressive," Nathan said, eying the jet. "Owning or renting?"

"Renting," Finch replied. "Normally I'd use one from the IFT fleet but... I assume on this occasion that would be a tip-off."

They were standing beside the stairs leading into the private jet. Nathan swung his bag around his shoulder-- computer equipment, mostly, contrasting Reese's carry-on, which was comprised of guns and destruction-- and headed up the stairs.

Finch stopped Reese as he started to follow. The wind was blowing, gusts lifting the hems and the collars of their coats, eliciting odd, metallic keens as it twisted through the propellers.

Reese gave Finch an expectant, raised-eyebrow look.

He said it anyway. "You could continue our work."

"Careful, Finch. I might start thinking you like _Nathan_ better than me."

" _Nathan_ can't walk away from this; _you_ can."

Reese sidestepped him and took the first stair.

"John there are very few things that I find more abhorrent than asking you to do something that might get you killed."

There was a hint of a smile in Reese's expression as he turned back. "Then don't ask."

The dull-throbbing rumble and the weightlessness of take-off; muffled sounds of footsteps from the cabin and the low shake of the plane. Finch perched in one of the window seats with a laptop; Reese was beside him and Nathan was in the seat across the aisle. There was something telling about the arrangement-- which had happened thoughtlessly, intuitively-- that Finch didn't care to analyze too deeply.

"And here?" Reese asked, pointing to the diagram Nathan had drawn on the sketch pad. Dark lines sketched out a schematic of the facility housing his Machine.

"Maybe three, four guards."

Reese made 'x's near the south side. "How many here?"

"I don't know." Reese waited. "Damnit, it was the first time I'd been outside for ten months." Ingram swiped the pen from Reese-- a stiffening of shoulders, Nathan never had grown out of the grabbing tendency-- and bolded a question mark near the east side of the building. "I'm not you, after all."

Reese produced a stubby pencil from his pocket. "Nothing wrong with planning ahead."

Finch's fingers were cramping. He flexed them, glanced out the window. The city below them was lit up bright and chaotic and alive, a million glowing pinpoints to a million different lives. Detroit, maybe, or Madison; he'd lost track.

Reese was looking at him off the reflection in the window: an unwavering, black-hollowed image.

"You should get some sleep, Finch."

"I need to finish--"

"You can't save the world in five hours," Reese said mildly. "but you can rest your eyes."

"He's right." Nathan said. "Give it to me, I'll work on it."

Trust was difficult. It took Finch a moment to relinquish the laptop. "Wake me in four hours."

It was dim and soft-edged with the low-glowing lights and the blue off the screen; the thrum of the engines muffled all other noises and beneath them, the rest of the world suspended.

It was very quiet.

And very peaceful.

Finch wanted to stay there, forty thousand feet in  the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

Ingram got edgier as the plane descended and the North Dakota countryside came into view. On the way down the stairs he paused; Finch said something, low and tense and teasing, and they went down.

None of them had spoken about the bullets they'd receive if they failed; none of them had mentioned that that would be the kindest of alternatives.

Reese didn't have to like Ingram to respect him.

The drive was quiet, wind and the drumbeat of keys from the backseat. Two miles out they cut the headlights; one mile out they walked. It was hilly terrain, rough, grassy stalks pulling at their ankles; Reese knew better than to do anything more outward than place a steadying hand on Finch's arm when he stumbled.

It was cold. High thirties, chill of the wind. Reese was already cataloguing wind speeds so he knew how much it would throw off his shot.

The facility's location could have been better. Isolated, yes, but it lacked barb-wire fences and flood lights and high ground and heavy arms. Same as the structure they had rescued Ingram from, Control hadn't expected anyone to come looking.

But they'd done what they could, likely after Reese and Finch's assault on it. Ingram had recalled maybe six, eight guards; Reese immediately counted a dozen on the north and west sides, with an undetermined number on the others.

He eyed the single entrance. Four men paced in front of it. "How long will you need to get in?" They'd zeroed in on the door with his scope: a key code lock.

"Difficult to tell until I've seen it. Ten, twelve minutes." Finch had a bag of equipment at his side, padded to prevent it from rattling. "Once I've done that, it should take me considerably less time to crack the code to the server room, assuming they're using roughly the same sort of system."

A minute was an eternity in a fight; they'd be lucky to be alive in twelve.

"Can you cover him for that long?" Ingram asked roughly.

"Guess we'll find out." Reese grappled in his own bag and rooted through it. "But I'll need your help." He handed him two guns, several flash bags and tear gas grenades. "You get to be the distraction."

"Your sacrificial lamb? I'm touched, Reese."

Reese revolved, fully. "Can you take an order?"

Ingram weaponed-up. His mouth tightened into a somber line, solidifying the deal they'd made on the plane.

It was a clear night: the moon cast silver across the field and their faces, turning them ghost-like, hollowing out the bones. The sky was star-drunk and endless.

Reese glanced at Ingram, then Finch. They both gave him brief nods.

He ghosted across the slopes, moving in the direction of the wind so the shadows off the grass swayed with him. He got himself behind a knell eighty feet from the facility and peered through his scope.

They were lit up like targets.

He took out the first four before they could shout.

Necessary kills; they couldn't risk the noise.

"It's clear, Finch. I'll cover you."

He watched as Finch picked his way across the field, thought hard at him, _don't fall._ His figure had turned argent under the moonlight, it was the worst of nights to plan a raid: he couldn't have been more exposed. Reese's shoulders were taut and he forced them to relax enough to make a steady shot if he needed to.

He scanned the facility. Two guards, making their rounds. They hit the corner and saw the bodies. The shout was loud as a gunshot.

Reese shot them in the knees.

Finch was getting closer, twenty, fifteen feet away.

The guards on the north and west side were converging towards the entrance.

"Where are you, Ingram?" Reese said.

"East side. Ready?"

He replied with an affirmative.

Even from the opposite side of the building the glare off the flash bangs was painful. Half the men detached from the main group and ran towards them.

Finch reached the door. He slid the bag off his shoulder and scrutinized the lock, muttering something about recursive functions and binary counters.

A guard swung around the corner. Reese shot him.

"Over there--" A called command, a gesture in his direction.

He flattened himself against the knell as bullets tore over his head, through the turf. Dirt spat across his knees. The faint whistle of a bullet over the wind-- infinitely thinner and more lethal--, the scrape of something through the corner of his collar.

The wind sent the clouds across the moon.

He rolled to his feet. He went at a dead run, angling towards the side. Men, heading towards Finch. He shot them as he moved, clumsy shots to the knees and legs.

The clouds scudded off. Silver again, illuminating his position. He hit the ground hard as bullets hammered past him.

"Reese--" Finch exclaimed.

A light gap in the fire. Reese lifted his head. One of the downed men had regained his gun and was swinging it towards Finch. Reese took the operative out in a headshot.

Finch flinched backwards. Close-- five feet away, maybe. There was a bloody stain on the gray-white wall.

"Going to have to start aiming a bit above the knees, Finch. Don't think we have twelve minutes." Reese said, letting a reminder slip into his voice.

It got Finch moving. "Understood." He returned to the lock. "Perhaps I can..." He threw out something about trees, bit values.

Reese took out another three guards as they came around the north side, didn't stop moving. He was closing in on the building, close without being too close-- his instincts warred at him to stand in front of Finch and stay away, keeping his sightline clear.

There was a glow coming from the east side of the building. An acrid smell of smoke on the wind.

"Ingram." Reese said. "What happened?"

"Flash bangs started a fire." Coughing and gasping from Ingram's side of the line: he must have deployed the tear gas. "Should have thought of that before using them in June."

There was a harshness in his voice. "You're boxed in." Reese said.

A confirmation from the silence.

"How much longer, Harold?" Ingram asked.

"Four minutes, maybe three. I'm close." Finch's breath hitched. "Nathan, are you-- is it enough--?"

Except it wasn't. If they were flanking Ingram, he'd be dead in two.

"Reese." Finch said.

"No."

"Reese, you have to go help him."

"I'm not leaving you undefended."

Finch's fingers never stopped moving over the lock, but Reese could hear his voice edging into fury. "No, no you are not allowed to make this decision over emotion, you don't get to elevate my life over his."

Chatter of gunfire. Reese dove to the side, rolled back to his feet and shot the operatives turning towards Finch.

"We don't get to play God." Finch snapped.

"That's not fair." Reese forced through his teeth. He stopped moving; his position was good. There was gunfire in the background from Ingram's line, getting loud and coming closer.

"And what you're doing is?"

He could hear Ingram's breaths deepening into pants.

Ingram should have been asking for help. Should have been ordering Reese to cover him. But he wasn't.

The person who'd given him a second chance; his lifeline; his friend-- or the ability to look in the mirror tomorrow.

Reese gritted his teeth. If Finch died. If Finch died, Reese wasn't sure who he would never forgive: himself, Ingram, or Finch.

He pushed himself to his feet and turned toward the east side at a run. He snagged the bag he'd left in his original position without stopping-- god knows he didn't want to get shot at with its contents-- and pulled out four packages. The Semtex were on timed detonators, each grouped into five pound bundles. He dropped them near the south side.

Reese was rounding the edge to the east side of the structure when they blew. He stumbled forwards, landing awkwardly on his elbow. Fire billowed in front of him, skimming the grass, wavering and growing taller with the wind.

Ingram was crouched against the side of the wall, fingers tensed around his gun. The operatives were moving in on him from the right and the left, avoiding the flames that had blocked him from the front.

Reese took them out. He slipped to the side, into the shadows, as those converging towards the entrance reversed direction and went towards the south. The explosions had been large enough to give off the impression that they were trying to blast their way in.

"I've cracked the code." Finch said. "We're in."

Ingram was twenty feet away. He turned towards him.

"Go," Reese said. "I'll cover you."

Ingram hung tight against the wall. Reese took out the operatives moving his way. He'd seen the concentration of operatives near the east side, knew they'd directly pass him when they went after the explosions.

There would be no one to cover him if he tried to reach the entrance.

"Where's Reese?" He heard Finch ask Nathan.

"Not sure if I can get through." Reese said. "You should go."

A silence. "John?"

"Ingram." Reese said.

A pause; then a sound like shifting footsteps. "Sorry about this, Harold."

"Wait-- what are you-- no. Nathan--"

And Reese knew that Ingram was grabbing Finch's arm, keeping him off balance so he had to step forward or fall; the grip would be efficient, painless but unbreakable, Reese had shown it to Ingram while Finch slept on the plane.

_One rule,_ Reese had told Ingram. _If I can't get out and I need you to get Finch to safety, you'll do it._

"I'm sorry, Reese." Ingram said, over Finch's protests.

Bullets cleaved into the wall eight feet away. He spun, returning fire.

"No need." Because Reese wasn't. He'd trained for a war that shouldn't have been fought, he'd swallowed so many lies from the CIA he'd nearly drowned. He'd learned the hard way that there were only a few precious things worth dying for, and he prided himself on knowing exactly what they were.

* * *

An office space, cubicles and monitors, some closed and powered-down, others running code that streamed across the terminals. Nathan released his arm in front of the door leading into the server rooms.

"What the _hell_ are you doing?" Finch whipped around. "We don't leave people, I realize you may not care but I--" He stopped. Because that grip: Nathan knew his way around a fight, but he'd never learned technique. Nathan was leaning against a desk watching him with a gaze that was somewhere between determined and stricken. "That was the order. The one order."

"Sorry, Harold."

 He could still hear the lethal sound of rapid-fire past the walls. But he and Reese didn't leave each other: that was their unspoken rule, even if neither wanted the other to uphold their end of the bargain.

"What you need to do," Nathan said, stepping closer to him, "is get through the doors. Or we're all dead anyway." He turned, heading towards the door.

"Don't close it." If Nathan did, the entrance door's key code would reset itself, trapping Reese out. He had to believe that Reese would make it this far.  

"If they come this way." Nathan said.

Finch was suddenly fiercely, uncontrollably furious.  There was something fundamentally wrong with the situation. It felt like a laughing twist of Fate or a cruel tradeoff: Nathan or Reese. The anger must have shown, because Nathan stopped. The only light was coming from the few computers left on; it turned the room muffled blue, underwater. Finch slowly turned towards the key pad. This one went faster, it was disappointingly similar to the entrance's; it took him six and a half minutes.

Nathan was at his shoulder when the light flashed green. Finch glanced towards the far door once more before swinging the other one open.

The servers spanned out, huge, tall constructs composed of circuitry and data. Hundreds of red lights blinked at them, on, off: eyes. Immaculate gray stone lined the floors and corridors were formed between the servers at perfect right angles; dim flood lights were spaced intermittently above them.

Finch limped inside.

The entrance door opened from the outer room. Reese blurred into the office, lunging to the side. Bullets hailed into the walls. "Close the door." Reese shouted.

An operative appeared in the doorway, swinging his gun. Reese rolled behind a desk.

Ingram grabbed the edge of the door and slammed it shut as bullets pounded into the steel.

Finch reached for it.

"You go out there and they'll kill both of you."

He kneeled and jerked out his laptop. His fingers skidded across the keys. Wild, tumultuous pings from the gunfire, muffled and echoing. It took him seconds to hack into the network of computers in the room outside.

Camera feed. Reese was crouched behind one of the tables; six operatives were spreading into position around him. There was no way out of it: if he moved, they'd shoot him.

A dim memory, Monica Jacobs and a laptop battery. Finch decided on eight of the laptops in the outer room and hacked into the passwords coded into the batteries, hijacked the firmware.

"What are you doing?" Nathan said.

"Open the door." Finch said, then disabled the microcontrollers regulating the laptops' charges.

A shower of sparks exploded from the eight laptops, directly beside the operatives. Reese moved fast. Three of the distracted men were down before Reese dropped to avoid the remaining shooters; he sent a stream of bullets from the ground, forcing them to dive behind the cubicles.

Nathan yanked the door open.

Reese threw himself inside.

The door slammed.

Silence. Silence, and their heavy panting breathing and the odd crackle-mumble of feedback from the servers; there was something reserved and stilly to the air, absorbing the noise and settling it like dust. Finch awkwardly climbed to his feet.

There were hints of blood on Reese's shirt-- grazes, likely--, the dark formation of a bruise, grass scuffs and a raw burn across his forearm. Finch groped around his first aid kid and passed him a tube of ointment.

Reese rubbed on the solution; Finch could tell that Reese was checking him and Nathan over as he did. "That was very clever, Finch." Reese said.

Finch passed him a roll of gauze. "Don't do that again, John."

Reese looked at him. His expression made it clear that he would, more times over, maybe even gladly. Finch let it be. Some arguments didn't have compromises.

The sound of bullets slamming into the door started up again.

"They won't get through that way." Reese said, running his hand down the door. "Too thick. Doubt they have the equipment to blast their way in."

"I take it the lock code..." Nathan started.

"Overridden." Finch responded. He revolved, slowly. Put his hand on one of the servers. The red-eye of one of the lights was warm beneath his palm. Life, a machine, or something in between. All that time, gazing into the glassy reflection off the security camera-- _did you know?_ after the ferry, _what's wrong with you?_ after the virus: something very much like this had been staring back.

"Impressive, isn't it?" Nathan agreed. He started walking. "I know where the main room is."

Their steps echoed faintly like the ripples of a pond; shadows clung to every bare-lit corner. It was an unlived in place. An inhuman one. Finch bit back a laugh that would have been a compromise between bitter and pained. The three of them were dead to the world. Ghosts in the Machine, indeed.

The main room was less of a room and more of an alcove, boxed-in and walled-up by servers. There was a table at the back of it, tangled with wires and circuitry; there was a main computer in the center and nine monitors arranged above it.

Nathan paced slowly into the room. He pulled a chair. "She thought she was required to be present to alter it. I built a backdoor."

Finch wasn't surprised. Nathan was very good at putting in backdoors.

The monitors came to life, scrolling code. Finch rested his hand on the back of the chair. "They've gotten farther than we thought."

Nathan leaned forward. "Doesn't look like there's much work to be done." Finch passed him the bag and he withdrew the flash drives containing their extended part of the code.

"Wait." A line hovered out at Finch. "They've altered yours. We'll have to make some adjustments." He pulled out a second chair.

They started, but it wasn't a coding frenzy as before: this required tweaks, corrections and rewrites; it was crude work, the figurative square through a circle. Reese patrolled the area somewhere out of sight, an occasional footstep echoing over the staccato of tapping keys.

He didn't indulge in many thoughts of the future, their line of work: but he was thinking far enough forward to consider the implications of Nathan's-- Nathan-- being alive.

Nathan would still have to leave, of course. Finch wondered where he'd go. They'd done their share of travel for IFT; Nathan relished every trip and every country. There wasn't a culture in existence that he couldn't neatly assimilate himself into, as if he'd been there for years.

They wouldn't have to necessarily cease contact with one another, so long as they were careful. And when he got there-- work the numbers? Find a partner?

Reese's figure reflected in the black box on the monitor. Finch turned.

"Lot of noise coming from the other side." Reese said. "I think the rest of the party just got here."

Finch glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen. Two in the morning. Four hours had passed. There was a quality of timelessness among the servers-- timelessness and lifelessness-- that stopped all the clocks.

Four hours would have been precisely enough time for Control to fly from D.C. to North Dakota. Finch shifted windows. There had been no security cameras in the facility-- likely so those such as himself couldn't hack in-- so he accessed the laptops from the outer room and switched on the web cams.

Control's operatives were spread across the room. Some kneeled beside the injured, applying pressure and bandages; others patrolled the room. A woman stood beside the door punching codes into the keypad. Agent Hersch flanked her.

"Good turnout." Reese observed, flicking his eyebrows.

"Not exactly typical government procedure." Finch agreed. "I believe it would cause quite a stir if the public saw this."   

"Mayhem and sedition..." Nathan said, grimly pleased. "And here I thought we were smart enough not to repeat the past."

Finch hacked into the news networks.

_"...India flooding with nearly six thousand missing or presumed dead..."_

_"...Mexican authorities shut down drug smuggler tunnel in Nogales..."_

_"In Houston, Aryan Brotherhood gang member sentenced to 150 months in prison..."_

Thank God for the twenty four hour news cycle. He overrode the footage and replaced it with the real-time from the webcams.

_"What's this-- Brian, I'm not sure what this is..."_

_"I apologize, I don't know where this video is coming from..."_

_"It looks like, it looks like some kind of raid by the U.S. government--"_

_"Are they FBI? SWAT? CIA? Who are these people?"_

"They'll be here soon." Nathan said. "How much longer is this going to take?"

It took an hour and a half to finish the Machine. And then it was online, seeing-- everything: the screens opening up to a million glimpses into the world, a woman pulling out a child from the wreckage of a building in Chennai, uniformed officers curtaining off the Nogales tunnel, James Meldrem of the Aryan Brotherhood stepping into his cell. _Time to make God,_ she'd said, and if omniscience was the sole criteria than she had been right. There was a bird cam placed high in one of the trees outside the facility and a laptop left on the hood of a car, both allowing them a clear view of the surrounds near the facility.

It was still dark and the moon had gone behind the clouds; the shadows of dozens of Control's were surveying the structure, testing the walls. One man held something that appeared to be an explosive.

The reporters arrived before the SWAT teams.

Reese had a hand resting on the back of the chair Finch was sitting in and Nathan was standing, leaned close to the monitors. They watched as cameras swarmed into the area, flashes and bewildered faces, then the questions: _what are you doing here? who are you? what is this place?_

The woman sidestepped a camera and sat in front of one of the laptops. She stared into the screen.

"Smart woman." Nathan said.

Finch cut the webcam's stream from the rest of the network and activated the microphone. The light blinked.

"Well-played, Mr. Ingram." She said.

"I had a little help."

She smiled, cold and faintly amused. "The man behind the curtain. Is he there with you now?"

"Yes." Finch said.

"My partner." Nathan added. "And you can call him Mr. Wren." A reckless lilt in his voice turned the edges of his words upwards, and Finch almost pegged it as overconfidence, but it wasn't. He felt it too: that pure, liberating jolt of truth, a word they'd hid for so many years-- _partner_.

The woman nodded, a spare tilt of the head. "We have a contingency in place that will allow the numbers to continue to be worked on our side of things. I assume you've no plans to jeopardize Northern Lights."

"No more than you." Finch answered.

"Do tread carefully. You're playing a dangerous game."

"Is that a threat?" Nathan asked.

"Call it a word of advice." The woman reached forward and shut the laptop.

The screen was black. Finch watched Reese and Nathan in the reflection. He leaned forward and hit several keys before pushing himself to his feet. "I bypassed the key code." A door clanging, far off. "They'll be here soon. I suspect there will be enough ensuing chaos that we can slip through."

And it was-- over. There was a wild-tinged taste of freedom to that thought-- almost foreign; the air was flooding back into the room and he felt light-headed with the rush of it. It would be lightening, outside, defiant near-dawn streaks of orange across the sky.

Finch followed Reese out of the main room in the servers.

"Harold."

He turned. Nathan was still standing beside the table. His fingers were resting along the edge, there was a looseness to his shoulders and even before he understood exactly what it meant, he knew.

"You're staying." Finch said.

Nathan shifted his feet. "I am." He lifted his head and there was a proud, calm tilt to it. That look of relief that had flooded his face and his frame when he'd said: _it's time we told our side of the story._ And later: _I knew you'd come, my friend._

Finch wanted to grab Nathan and pull him out, he wondered if Reese would force him if Finch asked him to; he couldn't hear them but he knew the people were moving closer, every moment. "Nathan." _We don't leave people_ , he'd said. Panic was simmering beneath his ribcage.  " _If_ you don't go to prison-- then for the rest of your life you will be watched. They'll tap your phone and bug the place you live. You won't be able to step onto the street without a journalist following you."

"I'll get to see Will again." Nathan said. "That's enough for me."

"Nathan, please. Don't do this." No person had ever blindisded Finch as thoroughly as Nathan had before and was doing now. He limped forward, grasping his arm. "It will be too risky to remain in contact. This. This will be the last time." 

Voices, drifting above the servers. He could feel Reese at his shoulder. "Finch. We need to go, now."

"Doesn't have to be." Nathan stepped forward. "You could come with me."

He could. He could tell his side of the story, or the closest he could without revealing his Machine. He could see Grace again, he could see Will again, he could return to whatever shattered remnants of normal left of the life he'd abandoned three years ago.

It was a once-off offer, a train ticket to anywhere. All he had to do was wait for those footsteps to sweep around the corner. Finch was close enough to Reese to feel the tension in the other man's shoulders; he was close enough to feel the stillness and the _waiting_ , the same stance Reese took whenever he was about to get hit hard.

Finch reached into his coat and withdrew the photograph. In the beginning. He'd held onto it for a long, long time: for reasons of guilt and regret and redemption. It hadn't been quite as long since he'd stopped doing things for those reasons. He stepped back.

Nathan's fingers closed around the photo. He nodded to himself. "We had a good run."

"Nathan, I--" Finch thought of the first time he and Nathan had ever met-- in a Library, of course, among dusty bookshelves and abandoned aisles; he thought of all-nighters and hacking dares, swapping passwords like life stories and strings of code like covert notes. Their wonderfully naive desire to change the world; that shared feeling of purpose as they watched the Towers come down. Clink of ice on ice and glass on glass after making their first business deal, being christened Will's uncle, decades of friendship disintegrating into pieces and that brief wordless smile of certainty when Finch had stepped onto the ferry.

A hundred things to say, no time to say them.

"That's alright, Harold." Nathan said, smiling faintly. "I know." After a beat he went on, "I don't like what you did about the irrelevant list. But you had your reasons."

And after three years of burying guilt, then this-- this, not a reprieve, not forgiveness, but understanding. He wouldn't have asked for more and he wouldn't have taken less. "I understand why you did what you did with the list and the backdoor and the journalist." Finch said.

Footsteps echoing through the corridors.

"Finch." Reese murmured.

"Look after him." Nathan said, to Reese.

Reese tilted his head in a nod.

Footsteps and voices colliding in the space in between, rattling the dust into the air; camera flashes around the corner, flickering across the servers and turning the black spare-white and exposed.

Reese's hand was steady around his arm and Finch let it stay there. _We don't leave people_ , he'd said, except for Finch that rule had only ever applied to one.

Red eyes, blinking. Footsteps floated from the right and they slipped to the side, waiting; the sharp edges dug into his back.

They footsteps went past.

 Reese stepped forward, stopped. He turned slowly. "If you're doing this out of some sort of-- obligation, to me--."  The words sounded as if they were grating past sandpaper.

"Obligation is not the word I would use," Finch said, lightly.

Reese was still hesitating. "You're the one that can walk away this time. I know it's easier not to take a chance. Easier to fall back on what you know." He closed his eyes, like a wince, then opened them. "I won't let you do something you'll regret."

Finch had never been good at sentiment. But so many layers of unsaid and unacknowledged had been stripped away in the last few weeks, so this time he didn't pause and he didn't flinch off it. "John. Let's go home."

* * *

_"...remarkable development that the IFT founder, Nathan Ingram, believed to have been killed in a terrorist attack in 2010, is alive. He claims to have been held prisoner by members of a branch of the U.S. government called the Special Counsel..."_

Finch brought another window up on his monitors.

_"--a bizarre system uncovered in a government-owned facility in North Dakota. Engineering professor James Kingsley is here to shed some light on it."_

_"Thanks, Diane. It appears to be a massive system capable of accessing and utilizing any camera and microphone of any device. In short-- it's been spying on the American people every hour of every day."_

Finch cut to another monitor. Reese's shadow slanted across the table as he shifted in front of his place beside the window.

_"--nearly a dozen dead and many more wounded near the facility. It's suspected that the government ordered the killings as some sort of cover-up--"_

_"I'm sorry, Richard, I'm going to have to cut you off. A special report--" The video changed to a busy room, paper and coffee and journalists and an abandoned podium in the front. "Mr. Ingram has called a press conference. He should be here in--" Fumbling noises, a camera._

_Nathan walked into the room, stopping behind the podium. He waited till the questions died down. "Like all of you, I watched the Towers come down. That day I decided I wanted to do something--  that had purpose. Something that would change the world and save lives. People call what w--" He stopped, looked down, glanced at the camera. "People call what I built different things. I call it the Machine."_

_Commotion from the opposite side of the room._

_"Will?"_

_He crossed the space in a run and threw his arms around his father. Will's shoulder shook. "I thought-- I thought--" A deep heavy gasp, frantic and panicked. "Dad?_ _Dad._ _"_ He was laughing and crying: joy and grief, same coin.

_Nathan hung onto him. "It's okay."_

Finch turned the sound low. Soft whir of monitors and the noise of traffic far-off, sun puddling across the floorboards, slanting past Reese. Mid-morning droplets sparkled off the cobwebs. It was still early enough to be cold and the gunshot wound ached, but as with the rest, it would heal.

His computer pinged.

Finch touched a key. "We have a new number."

Reese moved behind Finch's chair, catching his eye in the reflection. "They never stop coming," Reese said, with a whisper of a smile mixing dread and grim satisfaction.

Finch returned it. "Then we'd best get to work."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, all, for reading. And to those of you who have left comments over the course of this fic, thanks again. It is appreciated.


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